For many years, older workers have been encouraged to leave the labour market as quickly as possible. Many of them retired long before they actually got old. In Poland, these outflows from the labour force to non-participation were enhanced by restructuring processes and the obsolete skills of older workers in 1990s, the belief in lump of labour fallacy in times of high unemployment and numerous schemes of pre-retirement benefits and early retirement.
However, these outflows have become problematic as the demographic pyramid reverted and population aging processes accelerated. Now, in light of low participation rates, especially among older workers, severe population aging processes and low fertility rates, every worker is worth one’s weight in gold. In this research project, we formulate the main goal as to analyse the labour force attachment pathways of older workers that led to old-age non-participation by means of public employment office.
We observed the labour market history of all workers born between 1940 and 1965 who had experienced any period of registered unemployment and had deregistered anytime between 1990 and 2017 through:
- the start of collecting pension benefits,
- the start of collecting disability allowance,
- the start of collecting pre-retirement benefits,
- the turning of standard retirement age,
and we compared these with all other workers from the same birth cohorts.