Retiring in a New Age: Life After Paid Work, by Russell D. Lansbury and Marian Baird. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2026. ISBN: 978-1-041-11832-9. Hardback $94.40. eBook $32.99

What the paper says

Work and employment scholars Russell Lansbury and Marian Baird have written an engaging, stimulating, and short book (in the Routledge Focus series) on what people get up to when they cease the kind of work they have engaged in for most of their adult lives.The third member of the team, Ron Callus, sadly passed away in 2023 before the project was finished, and the book is dedicated to him.The book blends review and comment on quantitative survey data, most notably from HILDA (the Australian longitudinal survey of households, income, and labour dynamics), in-depth qualitative interviews with retirees, and policy prescription.The main focus is retirement in Australia, but this is enriched by international comparisons and a particular focus on Sweden.The authors write about 'retiring' rather than 'retirement' because the latter implies both passivity (non-work) and a one-off event that leads to a very different state from the one that preceded it.Instead, they view their subject as a process that can take place over an often-protracted period of time.Retirement can be seen as a continuum between reduced participation in the paid workforce and leaving it altogether.The book highlights several important changes that have taken place in recent years.One is the removal of a mandatory retirement age for most occupations in Australia and elsewhere, leading to greater variability in retirement.Second, as is also common elsewhere, the age of eligibility for the state pension has been raised recently (from 65 to 67), reflecting the fiscal pressures emanating from increases in life expectancy and the proportion of the population aged 65 years or above.Three, after some falls in the 1970s and 1980s, the average age of retirement in Australia has increased (from 59 in 2010 to nearly 65 in 2022), with the labour force participation rate of those aged 60-65 years increasing by over 20 per cent between 2000 and 2020.At the same time, there is growing variation between those who retire before and after 65 years of age.The authors highlight variations in retirement experience between social class/ occupational groupings.Those in professional careers tend to be retiring later and are more likely to work part-time after formal retirement.HILDA shows that the most important reason for retirement amongst white-, pink-, and blue-collar workers is ill health, whereas professionals and managers attach broadly similar importance to being able to afford to retire, to gain more leisure time, and to being fed up and stressed.Unsurprisingly, professionals are more comfortable financially than blue-collar workers in retirement.There are also striking health differences between occupational groups, with 60 per cent of former blue-collar employees reporting long-term health problems during retirement, compared with just over a third of former managers and professionals.It will come as no surprise that there are also pronounced differences in retirement experiences between the sexes.Women tend to retire earlier than men but have much smaller financial resources: on average; their superannuation accounts (occupational pensions) have less than a third of those of males.Class and gender intersect such that women who have had blue-collar careers are more likely to report that they are poor and just 'making ends meet' in retirement.