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This is a crucially important point by Kathy:
Given that pain is higher among blue collar workers than among white collar workers, and given that pain tends to increase with age, retirement has got to look to very different to blue collar workers who have done physical labor all their life, than it does to their more sedentary white collar counterparts. Conservatives and other Social Security crisis-mongerers love to scream about how if we don’t raise the retirement age the Social Security fund will go bankrupt. The more honest ones don’t claim Social Security is going to go under any time soon, but they do say that, given increased life expectancy, increasing the retirement age only makes sense.In fact, I once heard a University of Chicago economics professor make that very argument. It was a lecture so I couldn’t interrupt, but it was exasperating to listen to. Easy for you to say, Mr. Economics Professor! You can do your job until you’re 100, or until senility sets in, at least.But what about the people who scrub toilets for a living? Or health care workers who spend much of their work day manually lifting patients? Asking people to do highly physically demanding jobs like those until they’re 65 is already asking quite a lot. There’s a reason why the classic union steelworker contract had a “30 and out” pension provision. After 30 years on the job, a lot of those guys’ bodies had taken so much that they weren’t physically capable of doing physical labor anymore.This is why I don't go in for the "raise-the-retirement-age" solutions so popular among wonks and pundits. It's always talked about as a virtually painless solution to our entitlement challenges, and for the David Broders of the world, it is. But for the David Broders of the world, it's unnecessary. Broder is 78-years-old. He's working not because he has to, but because he wants to. If that's your frame of reference, of course raising the retirement age looks like a dead-obvious solution. People who do intellectual work that occupies their days, provides them with social outlets, affords them dignity and purpose, and demands sharpness of mind rather than fitness of body want to continue working. It's a net positive in their lives.But for folks who clean hotel rooms, who empty stock floors, who stand on their feet all day and greet customers and fold shirts and sell electronics and lay housing foundations work is a whole different type of thing. Some, of course, may enjoy the labor, and want to continue on with it. But many don't, it's what they do so they can spend their non-work hours in relative comfort and ease. More to the point, it's what they do so they can spend their retirement in relative comfort and ease. And as they age, the labor hurts, and their desire to spend their days in stockrooms flags, and the awareness that they've only so many years left to enjoy the world around them grows ever more acute. In the richest society in the world -- a society, in fact, that keeps growing ever richer -- we need not shave off those final years or rip leisure from those who've lived a life with all too little of it. If the Broders and Russerts and Byrds and, for that matter, Kleins of the world want to work late into their lives at jobs that accommodate their age and value their wisdom, then they should do so, and feel blessed that they have the option. They should not casually and callously legislate those preferences as if they're a painless, meaningless change.
