Transcription
Retirement exists so that you can relax after a lifetime of work. Unfortunately, an ever shrinking number of people are getting to retire at all, let alone be able to enjoy it. What is the point of all this mass production and technology if not to increase leisure time? Well, currently it's aimed at maximizing profit, which means you working more hours, retiring later, or worse of all, working until you die.
18th century Britain's where and when capitalism's growth began to resemble the modern era. Mostly poor women worked up to 12 hours a day spinning, weaving, lacemaking, etc. for extra money to survive. Pay was by the day or week, which incentivized capitalists to increase the intensity of work and hours worked, which they often did to inhumane levels. There's a prevailing myth that capitalism saved us from torturous 80 plus hour weeks of feudal toil. But it didn't. The factories of the mid-9th century might actually be the period of hardest work in terms of hours.
[music] By some measures, medieval peasants had much more leisure time than you, up to 6 months off in some cases. Most pre-capist formations across the world had less direct work hours because of the nature of agricultural labor more than anything else. But the point still stands. However, even that 40-hour week, 8-hour day is a lie and has been for decades. Salaried employment enables companies to reap the rewards via excessive uncompensated hours that they feel entitled to. Studies consistently show that salaried employees work far more hours than hourly employees. For example, medical residents and nurses are routinely forced to work 70 to 80 hour weeks.
According to officially tracked stats, Americans are working more, but this refers only to reported full and part-time workers, which misses a lot. like mothers who are working 80 hours a week between employment, child care, and housework or uncompensated labor. In 1991, US employees were working 1,664 hours per year. In 2021, Americans worked around 1,720 hours a year. This approach leaves out gig work, though, because there's no requirement for gig apps to report hours. According to IRS data, the number of net additions to the gig workforce was 1.2 million in 2020 with another 1.9 million in 2021. Even thinking conservatively, these people are adding billions of work hours to the total that aren't being accounted for.
Regardless, the number of hours worked is only half the story. We also need to talk about productivity. Simply put, productivity has also outstripped wages. Since 1979, US productivity grew 86% while hourly pay only 32%, a nearly three-fold gap. Even more is lost through inflation, but that's a conversation for another topic. Western economies like the US rank amongst the most productive in the world at $81 an hour. But what does that mean really? Well, it measures how much value each worker produces per hour, usually as a measure of the technical capital and level of exploitation they're subjected to.
Now, it's important to note that most of the 10 most productive countries are in the global north, while the supposedly least productive countries are all in the global south. This skews the data because a lot of the time the productivity of a Kenyan tea farmer versus a German automobile worker in objective measures is roughly the same or is even skewed towards the Kenyan farmer. The math of it gets a little complicated but you can take a look at these videos here for more. Regardless, despite this dramatic increase in productivity globally, capital still demands more profits. The working day has not shortened past the official 8 hours. This like most labor issues is because of the weakness of the labor movement in many parts across the world. Long sustained struggle and even much violence led to the reduction from 14 to 8 hours. That form of labor militancy is missing currently in many western countries. No significant improvement in working conditions results despite record profits and incredible increases in output and productivity. After 40 or more years of working though, you'll be able to retire and finally rest. Right.
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not to find to be proud of boys in line. [music and singing]
After World War I, the United States had completed the shift from agrarian to an industrialized society. This meant far more people dependent entirely on wages for survival than ever before, and the Great Depression catastrophically exposed that system pretty thoroughly. This hit the elderly and those nearing old age the hardest, leaving many literally penalous and destitute in their remaining years. Existing relief systems were funded mainly by donations and so were quickly overwhelmed being completely unequipped to handle the devastation.
However, long before the US faced the Great Depression, Germany had already established the world's first national old age social insurance program designed by the Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and initiated by Emperor William the 1st in 1881. The program was based on the emperor's declaration that the elderly have a well-grounded claim to care from the state. Of course, as a counter to the wildly popular socialist political demands of the era, Germany's program initially set their retirement age at 70 and was lowered to 65 in 1916. In US, this approach was used for two reasons. It was a retirement age and existing private pension plans and more significantly half the states with old pension systems also used it. Taking these and other benchmarks into account, planners judged age 65 to be more reasonable than 70. Regardless of the age limit, the committee's proposal for a compulsory contributory insurance system resulted in the Social Security Act on August 14th, 1935.
[music] Several edits were made across the years, finally solidifying by the 1940s. In Europe, though, countries like France embarked on their own path to a public pension, usually decades earlier. Prior to the 1910 retirement law, old age protection in France was sparse and fragmented, covering just 5% of the workforce. This new law mandated a contributory system funded by workers and employers for 12 million lower-income workers and peasants with pensions starting at age 65 which was then lowered to 60 in 1912 and allowed self-employed individuals to opt in. Concurrently, publications began promoting retirement as a period of leisure and well-being. These three models are the general trends seen across the rest of the world throughout the 20th century. Aside from the socialist block, which had entirely different and far more robust and solid retirement schemes, how about the modern day?
While those in power tended to lower their retirement age at or near its inception, today's trend is to raise them. Where is this happening? The real answer is more places than you could reasonably fit into this video. So, we'll just mention six western countries. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. Increasingly, they all have very similar problems because they're all using approximately the same system, which has structural flaws making these problems all but inevitable. It's not an accident that all these countries are struggling in the same way. All six NATO allies are confronting a collapsing worker to retiree ratio and or supposedly unsustainable pension finances driven by aging populations. That's their excuse at least.
France, as you may remember from the riots, raised its retirement age from 62 to 64 in 2023 because Prime Minister Macron declared the system financially unsustainable, saying that keeping it at 62 would cause total systemic collapse. It's not much better in Germany, which projects a decline of 6.3 million people in its working population by 2030 due to low birth rates, which politicians say directly threatens their precious GDP. Spain's public pension deficit reached 2.5% of GDP in 2021 despite major reforms in 2011, 2013 leading the government to fundamentally change the system. Italy cited surging inflation for current spending levels being untenable. The US anticipates its 65 plus population nearly doubling by 2080 from 12 to 23% while the working age population dropping from 60 to 54% which would create an unsustainable worker to retire ratio. The UK already periodically reviews the retirement age as a matter of law, but is considering raising the state pension age to 68 due to alarming to them demographic data and extreme pressure to maintain solvency.
In order to deal with this labor shortage, each country is raising their retirement age as a way to force people to work longer to supplement the workforce. This is also the main reason for lack of immigration into these countries. No, it's not Jews or Muslims coming to destroy your way of life or white genocide as I've laid out clearly in this earlier video here. It's simply economics and bringing workers today is preferable to capital than investing in people first policies that'll raise birth rates to sustainable levels in 20 years maybe. That's why every former socialist government more or less that had these people first policies experienced steady population increase until the restoration of capitalism when it immediately plunges never to return to a healthy level.
France aims to add 300,000 workers to boost tax revenue and direct those extra funds away from pensions, which does add labor, but also reduces pension costs. Germany was a bit more explicit, not hiding behind tax revenue, stating they want to keep workers in the labor market for longer to foster growth, which will do very little to stem the projected 2030 worker shortage. An Italian economist stated that they will have to increase retirement days to reduce pensioners in proportion to the labor force to offset workforce depletion. The US is trying to extend careers using 401k incentive rewards to delay retirement and retain older workers. The UK's proposed rise in the retirement age is trying to offset labor issues they say were exacerbated by COVID-19. Everybody has their excuse, but in the end, the plan is to raise their retirement age.
As I mentioned, Macron claimed that delaying retirement would increase payments into the system while reducing costs over a decade, which also forces retirees to [music] use savings. Spain's 2011 reform gradually raised the retirement age to 67 by 2027 and implemented something called a sustainability factor. Basically, a mechanism to automatically reduce future payouts as life expectancy rises. Something the 2021 reforms had to fix. The US increased the age of full Social Security eligibility from 65 to 67, imposing permanent benefit reductions for early claimants, which will force poorer old people to work longer, whether or not it's healthy or even possible for them.
Unfortunately for workers, the retirement age is outpacing supposed rising longevity. France's retirement duration peaked for those born in 1950. Daily UK mortality shows that their retirement age of 68 would cause 15,800 annual deaths before pension eligibility with 23,000 dying in poverty without ever seeing their pension yearly. German researcher Anzo Weber noted that even maximum senior workforce participation would only partially alleviate shortages. 20% of adults over 50 in the US have nothing saved for retirement and fear they won't have enough to live on and will need to work until they die.
Some countries are offering alternatives to increasing the retirement age in whole or in part. Spain reduced penalties for early retirement and boosted rewards for late retirement while eliminating automatic life expectancy cuts. So some good. Italy's long service pension allows retirement after 40 years of contributions with no age requirement. While some propose flexible retirement at 67 with reduced benefits, surprising no one, changes like these aren't very popular.
One reason is because life expectancy doesn't just consistently rise. One piece of evidence comes from a study showing that life expectancy for non-college educated Americans, which has been falling since 2010, is now 8.5 years shorter than college graduates. This trend is compounded by overall US life expectancy also dropping significantly in 2020 and again in 2021 due to their atrocious handling of COVID-19. In 2022, Americans across all demographics were dying younger, driving life expectancy down even more. To top it all off, the wealthiest Americans outlive the poorest by more than a decade. It stands virtually alone among so-called developed nations in terms of life expectancy, having not seen a rebound similar to those of their peers.
As we've seen, the idea behind delaying retirement age is to expand labor supply and reduce pension costs. This argument relies on misinterpreting life expectancy data. Life expectancy is an estimate that applies to birth cohorts, not to predicting an individual's longevity. Average life expectancy masks all type of social inequalities and ignores a very important distinction between lifespan and healthy lifespan.
[music] For many, especially marginalized groups, the physical ability to work does not extend to their statistical life expectancy. So, basing retirement policy solely on rising averages demands more labor from older and sicker populations. This disconnect has been studied by economist Theresa Gillarduchi, who researches older workers' economic security. She points out that supporting research often imagines a highly idealized near-perfect worker who effortlessly extends their career without facing age discrimination, pay cuts, or health decline. It's unscientific because they don't acknowledge the fact that they're using an extremely special case. She emphasizes an important, obvious, but rarely considered fact. Most people don't decide when to retire. She says the verb retire isn't a verb that really belongs to the agency of the worker. It's the employer's choice. For most, retirement is forced on them due to declining skills, productivity, sickness, injury, and or disability long before they [music] plan to.
Let's say you are employed, but you're not particularly happy with your job. Staying in a hated job is as hazardous to your health as being unemployed. Stressful, insecure, or [ __ ] work contributes to high blood pressure, heart disease, weakened immunity, and mental health struggles. Demoralizing work saps motivation to create or adhere to healthy habits, increasing the risk for obesity and diabetes. Demanding jobs sabotage social engagement vital for seniors which intensifies isolation and loneliness which is already at crisis levels. Delaying retirement ignores cognitive risks because while stimulating work can preserve mental sharpness, dull jobs accelerate memory loss and stress. And if your work exposes you to pollutants or loud noises, your health will decline even more.
Now, some meaningful work can be good for your health, but that often [music] ignores that high stress, high injury roles like social work or firefighting are rarely sustainable into late age, no matter how meaningful they are. Likewise, the majority of labor isn't meaningful, a term defined vaguely as is. We will sidestep the conversation of meaningful labor for now. In advanced age populations, living longer rarely translates into being the paragon of good health. Yes, people are living longer thanks to better healthcare and a higher standard of living, but those extra years are or will be marked by a gradual increase in disease. Many of the elderly struggle with a multitude of health issues, chronic diseases, disabilities, normal gradual decline in cognition and mood, and abnormal lab findings that interact with one another, accumulate and leave the body frail, which elevates the risk for them dying in ways that conventional measures like life expectancy cannot capture. This should go without saying, but the older you become, the sicker you'll get. And all the while the gap between total lifespan and healthy lifespan widens.
So where does that leave us? Overproduction cycles and economic crashes dominate while issues such as food insecurity and homelessness continue. At current production and productivity levels, sensible distribution would result in everyone in the nation or more generally with the appropriate measures having their base needs met. More than that, we could easily get by and maintain current productivity levels with a shorter workday and or a shorter work week. What else were those centuries of efficiency and productivity gains for otherwise?
In addition to a shorter work week, we need to overhaul the concept of retirement entirely. With such a reduced schedule, how should we rehandle retirement? That's for you to decide in your own country. But a general reduction in retirement age is not a bad thing. That tied to some corporate profits being mobilized towards social ends to offset the slight reduction in net labor hours. and you have a sustainable setup. Less work and more meaningful work means more time for social engagement, community development, better healthcare outcomes, and more meaningful civic engagement. A sensible left-wing platform and a serious labor movement achieved this before and it can achieve it again. A better world is possible. That's all for this time. If you enjoy what I do, then please consider supporting me on Patreon. It really does help. I'd like to thank my patrons. So, thank you to There's