Stuck in the rush-hour of life

A decade ago, a journalist friend and I were invited to lunch by a reader in Rotterdam, who said he wanted to discuss our work. We showed up to find a cheery fellow in his fifties, who mostly seemed to want to discuss his golfing buddies. We listened politely for a while. When he moved on to his theory that black people were intellectually inferior, the lunch ended. It hadn’t seemed a brilliant use of anybody’s time.

Afterwards I asked my friend why he thought we’d been invited. He explained that the man belonged to a generation of middle-aged Europeans with nothing to do. These people had retired in their early fifties, in perfect health, and so they played golf and invited random people to lunch.

That man is a figure who is fast dying out: the male breadwinner, washed up before he is 60. He is the symbol of today’s career. Now, as we debate the new retirement age, we can glimpse the outlines of the new career. Working until nearly 70 is only the start of it. In the new 45-year career, every stage of working life will be different.

The current career is an odd creation. It often starts only in workers’ mid-twenties, when they leave university or finally find their first job. In these early years of working life women do well, because old-fashioned sex discrimination has mostly disappeared.

It’s been replaced by discrimination against mothers. Whereas women used to hit the glass ceiling, mothers now fall off a cliff: they drop into part-time or low-energy jobs. The “mommy track”, far from being a brief pause during the craziest few years of life, often lasts until the woman retires. “The punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” says Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York.

In today’s career, most good jobs go to men in their thirties and forties. As they are often young fathers knee-deep in nappies, the result is exhaustion. Lans Bovenberg, a Dutch economist who is rethinking the “life course”, says that people increasingly concentrate their work in “the rush-hour of life”. David Cameron and Barack Obama are examples of workers doing demanding jobs during their peak child rearing years.

But in today’s career, the rush-hour of life is brief. As the kids grow up, the career turns down. Most workers in their fifties are waning. They are becoming less productive, yet earning peak salaries – for now, says Bovenberg, people are underpaid when young and overpaid when old. So employers shed older workers. Only about half of people aged 54 to 65 in western countries still work. They then typically spend another 20-odd years in retirement.

In short, the current 35-year career is dysfunctional. It’s too densely packed, allocates too much work to young fathers, and too little to mothers and older people.

All that will change. I live in Paris, and on the boulevard outside our apartment the protesters march against plans to extend working life until 62. Communist posters on the wall by the local boutique hotel urge resistance. It’s no use. France’s National Assembly has passed the law. The American retirement age is rising to 67, and the British one to 68. The average Japanese man already works until 69.

. . .

But it’s not just retirement that is shifting. Companies, governments and academics are now rethinking the entire career span. Already, working couples have replaced the sole male breadwinner.

In the new career, these dual earners will work for 45 years, during which they will periodically change speeds. They can start in the fast lane, working full-time until they have kids. Then many men as well as women will want a spell in the slow lane, even if it means a pay cut. More and more schemes help them do this: the growth in sabbaticals, teleworking, or the new British law that gives workers the right to ask for a switch to part-time or flexible schedules. In the old career, anyone entering the slow lane had to stay there forever. But that won’t work in the new career, as it would mean writing off the enormous section of the new workforce that wants to spend time with its children, or at least feels it ought to.

Nowadays workers often start slowing down in their late forties. In the new career, that’s when you will speed up, as your children grow up. A mother re-entering full-time work at 45 will have over 20 years of career left, ample time to get serious. She will work hard until about 60 – unless she needs time off to care for ageing relatives – before she slows down again. Few people over 60 – men or women – still want to work full-throttle. In the new career they will downshift, in return for a drop in pay.

The new career matches the modern life-course. It’s on its way, though too late for people like me now stuck in the rush-hour of life.

simon.kuper@ft.com