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The age at which workers retire is affected by not just their health (or health issues) but also the demands of the job, and either of these could drive an earlier retirement date or a later one.
But according to a study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, the health issues can be broken down into "a small number of distinct work trajectories"—six, in fact—while two job demands affect retirement, even after controlling for health factors.
Researchers studied the HR records and health claim records of nearly 5,000 people across 26 Alcoa manufacturing locations who were employed by the company for at least one continuous year between 1996 and 2013.
They labeled health events of individuals and categorized them into six "clusters" of chronic diseases — asthma, arthritis, diabetes, depression, ischemic heart disease, and hypertension.
Interestingly, they found that workers who fell into the hypertension and/or arthritis clusters were more likely than others to retire later, not earlier. They theorized it was because of their employer-sponsored health insurance, which likely helped them manage the conditions as well as provided an incentive to continue working to have health insurance to manage them.
They also found this: "the state of an individual's health state at retirement is the result of a cumulative process of deteriorating health across the entire span of adulthood." That is, it's important to look at not just "health shocks," which of late have been more studied and publicized, but ongoing mid-life and pre-retirement health of workers as well.
They also categorized jobs by job demands, using experts from the plants to rate the jobs. They found that there was a link between job demands and retirement, even after accounting for health. Two factors seemed to be the cause: "increases in exposure to heat" and "less decision-making autonomy."
The takeaways from the study for employers are that not only do workers have a strong incentive to work longer if they can sustain access to retirement pensions and health insurance, but they may be able to stay on the job longer if they have access to care that can decrease the prevalence of, or help in management of, hypertension and arthritis.
In addition, if jobs that expose workers to excess heat can be changed, perhaps along with other physically demanding factors, so that heat is not such a major factor, workers may be able to continue to work longer—and if workers are provided with more autonomy in on-the-job decision-making processes, they likewise might be encouraged to stay on the job later rather than choosing earlier retirement.
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Marlene Satter
Marlene Y. Satter has worked in and written about the financial industry for decades.
