Work for work's sake is not a life

WHENEVER I go to the fridge and open the door I've usually forgotten why I went there in the first place. I know I want to extract something from it but have no idea what. I'm 52. And Kevin Rudd wants me and a few million other Australians of my generation to work until we are 67. God help us.

I'm relatively fit, I don't dribble and I scrub up all right in a suit, but my days are punctuated by involuntary groans whenever I rise from my chair or sink into the settee. Where did they come from? I don't know. I hadn't expected this to happen.

And I didn't expect my body to start wearing out. The accumulation of years of sporting injuries, tumbling off ladders while doing up the house, falling up the stairs after Friday night drinks with workmates, and the dull coccyx ache from decades of being welded to an office swivel chair have taken their toll.

What state will I be in in 15 years? What's the PM going to do? Dispatch the district nurse to the home of every vague-minded, bonesore sexagenarian to administer a few non-rebatable lines of coke to inject some much needed giddy-up before we all hobble off to work of a morning?

And I've been lucky. I've mostly worked in office jobs where the physical toll is not too great, the mental burden manageable and the work enjoyable, even fulfilling. But I come from a family of coal miners, dockworkers, labourers and factory fodder, people who aged before their time, who got injured or killed in workplace accidents, or crawled home at night after another bout of overtime never wanting to make another plastic widget in their lives.

This is not to say that working in a flour mill as my grandfather did is not satisfying at some point, but in the end it did his head and his lungs in, and it became work for work's sake, work to make ends meet.

Times may have moved on - better working conditions, for example - but there are still many people who want the daily grind to end sooner than later and not just those whose have rotten jobs - and let's face it, there are some really rotten jobs out there.

(I worked in an abattoir for a while and, curiously enough, I quite enjoyed it. But I knew it was only temporary, especially after I watched a slaughterman being stretchered out of the works after being fatally gored by a disgruntled bovine. The cow's time there proved to be temporary as well, although its early retirement was expected.)

The Federal Government's proposals to lift the formal retirement age and make people work longer before they can get access to a government pension has a whiffy arrogance about it that assumes everyone can, or wants to, work until they don't know what a refrigerator is, never mind what's in it; that everyone wants keep slogging away because they've got an HR department that hasn't downsized them yet; that they are happy to continue hacking at the coalface because they haven't yet lost heart or been defeated by hard labour, office politics or thwarted ambition.

And what jobs will we do until we're 67, waiting for the Government to grant a pension? How many 60-odd-year-olds are doing responsible, satisfying work in your office or factory?

And where is the meaningful work for the silver-haired and dodgykneed? Is there any such work here?

And so many local firms are outsourcing jobs that people may have to be offloaded to Manila or Mumbai. They could ring up people in the middle of their dinner and ask them irritating questions about their electricity provider.

Even so, all the evidence suggests that domestic employers still prefer the (cheaper) exuberance of youth over the wisdom and experience of age.

People may be sustained by little pills for high blood pressure or cholesterol, kept upright by a foundry of metal pins in their shoulders, knees and hips, and rescued by heart bypasses and prostate cancer surgery done by a robot, but being kept alive does not not necessarily equate with living longer.

The Government justifies its "live longer therefore work longer" plans by pointing to the demographic evidence that we are spending more time on this earth, and assumes this will continue.

But recently the medical community has been discussing the likelihood that for the next three or four decades at least our children will not live as long as their parents, as they suffer the effects of lifestylerelated health problems such as obesity, hypertension and heart disease. What will the Government do then? Lower the pension age?

There may come a point when, for some, their reservoir of energy and commitment runs dry, when they want to live a bit before it's too late. Life remains short and delaying people's access to the pension will only make it shorter.

Many folk give to the community by working and paying taxes for four decades or more. Surely, the time comes when the community should give them something back.The Age

Graham Reilly is an Age senior writer.