The recent review of the Federal Labor Agency in Germany showed an increase by 2.8 points up to 47.2 percent employment rate. This increase of senior employees can be explained to some extent with the growing share of population of elderly and the ascending propensity to work. In return, a decrease of the numbers of pensioners could be observed.
Concerning the debate about introducing retirement at the age of 67 these numbers are playing an important role, as critics say that there are not enough employment opportunities for older people. While leaders of the Grünen reject such a shift of retirement age, SPD General Secretary Andrea Nahles recently announced a draft law that schedules to postpone the reform until employment rate reaches 50 percent among the 60 to 65 year olds.
Last summer 27.5 percent of people approaching pensionable age were employed. It seems that there is still a long way to go to reach the 50 percent. But with an increase of 3.4 points compared to last year employees over the age of 60 recorded the highest growth than all other age groups. Labor market observers attribute this development mainly due to the end of the early retirement policy. It had set quite strong incentives to go into early retirement at the expense of tax payers. The German pension insurance reported a rising retirement age since the end of the policy from 62.3 to 63.5 years.
The online bank ING Diba has already started to face the challenge of an aging society by including more elderly people into their business. For their initiative “Apprentice 50plus” they were just recently awarded with the German Diversity Award. With this program people over the age of 50 get the chance to complete an apprenticeship lasting several months. This follows not just the idea of integrating the whole diversity potential of people into the workplace but to qualify them for a new job and a permanent employment at ING Diba.
