Older Workers in Transition: European Experiences in a Neoliberal EraBy DavidLain, SarahVickerstaff, Mariskavan derHorst. BRISTOL University Press, 2022, 214 pages, ISBN: 1529215005, 9781529215007, £40.00
本书研究欧盟国家60-70岁老年劳动者延长工作生涯的现象，揭示新自由主义制度如何将就业转型责任推给个人，导致不安全感与不平等加剧，对政策制定者和研究者有参考价值。
David Lain, Sarah Vickerstaff and Mariska van der Horst's collected volume is a contribution to the series ‘Rethinking Work, Age, and Retirement’. Addressed to researchers, policy decision-makers and the interested public, it focusses on sociological research and associated debates relating to extended working lives. Notably welcome attention is paid to individuals in their 60s and 70s, in the European Union, who extend their working lives; part of the growing trend in neoliberal societies to require workers to take responsibility for their own end-of-working-life employment. The authors articulate this problem in terms of neoliberal ‘responsibilization’ (Lain, Vickerstaff and van der Horst, pp. 4, 186–188). Instead of placing the responsibility for the choice to transition employment entirely on the shoulders of individual workers — as one might do if assuming their decisions result from wholly personal free choices — the authors argue that there are neoliberal institutional factors contributing to the choices informing older workers’ transitions. These are embedded in international bodies, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, particular state and/or governmental policies, and corporate practices and strategies. Almost all the chapters in the book detail complex variations between European countries and the extent to which — within these various (liberal, conservative, fragmented and social democratic) systems or types of welfare capitalism — transitioning between jobs involves the participation of different various agents, including the state, employers and other EU organizations. Individual chapters offer country-specific research from Ireland (Áine Ní Leíme), the UK (Lain Vickerstaff and van der Horst, and Anna Hokema), Belgium (Nathalie Burnay), Italy (Emma Garavaglia), Germany (Hokema) and Sweden (Clary Krekula). Furthermore, all the authors recognize that weakening welfare support and prioritizing the perceived needs of organizations rather than the workers severely constrains workers’ own choices in changing jobs and their consideration of employment transitions and trajectories. Specific cases covered include the internal movement of white- and blue-collar employees within and between organizations in the UK; manual workers in Sweden; temporary workers in Belgium; unemployed upper-level managers in Italy; and female teachers and others, including housewives, who work beyond the official retirement age in Germany and the UK. The contributors use qualitative research methods to present the complex lived experiences of older individuals attempting to make job transitions and their personal reasons for doing so. This provides a much-needed important contribution to the bridge jobs’ literature, which typically emphasizes the US context and is less appropriate to the situations in EU countries. Whereas comparative research often seeks differences between the employment practices in a range of countries, here remarkable similarities between the lived experiences of older people are recognized. Moreover, while individuals (of different classes, genders and health) end or change their employment for a variety of reasons, the different types of transition between jobs, in different countries, produce similar effects: insecurity, increased inequality and precariousness in one's later working life (often exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic). The stratification of retirement ages contributes to these growing problems. The book delivers valuable new evidence concerning those organizational practices and strategies that create age-based marginalization (such as ageism) that impact older workers’ job transitions. This observation is shared by all the authors, and as Krekula points out, it can result in workers facing the traps of the ‘precariat’, that is those who are impoverished and/or in precarious employment (p. 75). While the threat of being forced to join the precariat forces older people to remain in, or re-enter, the workforce, often in flexible and lower-income status positions, older workers paradoxically also encounter real difficulties in remaining in the job market. This new research points to the need to extend the various familiar theoretical approaches found in current debates about the sociological (and political) meaning of work and retirement, given the neoliberalist reinvention of both. Instead of seeing retirement as a shift from full-time work to full and permanent retirement, neoliberalism has transformed retirement into a staged process lasting several years. What no author acknowledges, let alone stresses, however, is the importance of retaining the claims of, and roles for, individual freedom and responsibility, within any alternative state or institutional provision for help with employment transitions. Without a place for a worker's own freedom and responsibility, it will be hard to deny the neoliberal mantra ‘to receive welfare from the state or corporations is to descend into a dependent way of life’. The explorative conclusions of the authors should, nonetheless, raise alarm among sociologists, political theorists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers. Firstly, neoliberal societies seem to allow individuals to take responsibility for ensuring their working lives are successful while, nonetheless, somehow ‘pulling the strings’ behind the scenes; often allowing age discrimination practices to go unchecked. Secondly, under the pressure of the neoliberal culture of personal responsibility not only do older workers internalize neoliberal attitudes (e.g. self-imposing age discrimination), they demonstrate little sense of solidarity or any awareness of the potential value of collective action. Instead, they accept their precariousness, insecurity and instability in the final years of their working lives, as inevitable, even deserved. Moreover, in an uncertain job market, employees attempt to regain control over their end-of-working-life situations, through what the editors term, ‘psychological reactance’ (Lain, Vickerstaff and van der Horst, pp. 188–190); this forces workers to take whatever opportunities are available in an organization, even though these may be detrimental. Accordingly, the authors of this provocative collection of revealing first-hand experiences show the extent to which social theorists and scientists need to propose fresh theoretical and practical strategies if there is to be a potentially useful increase in the sense of solidarity among the affected workers; one that might produce a genuine push for collective action. Without this, I would argue that we cede victory to the neoliberals in their devolution of responsibility on to older workers; a move that risks consolidating their voluntary political and social exclusion.