According to the Gage Canadian Dictionary, a senior is: older or elderly; an older person. A senior citizen, on the other hand, is defined as being: any member of the community who is of advanced years. Not much help in defining a senior person. We all know that seniors are those who are older in age but younger in action. That, also, does not accurately define a senior citizen. Much of what we base our conception of 'senior' on comes from what is considered retirement age. Currently, in Canada, it is accepted as being 65 years old. Such an arbitrary age; why not 60, or 70, or 75, or, on the younger side, 55? Who set 65 as the age of retirement? For the answer we have to turn to Germany during the time of Otto von Bismarck and the Industrial Revolution.
Old Otto arbitrarily picked 65 years because he thought, seriously, that hardly anyone lived beyond that age. Life expectancy was 45 years old. He felt that if people lived to 65, then they were entitled to some leisure time before they died. Perhaps back in Otto's day, 1889, few people did live to 'retirement' age; today, few do not.
According to A Potpourri of Tips and Trends for Church Libraries, today's research shows that "by the year 2020, we will have hundreds of thousands of people living past age 100. Given that, there's no reason to regard 65 as a normal retirement age. The idea that people should do nothing for one third of their lives becomes unrealistic." Wow! One hundred or more years old. Why not?
[The above quote from a library association bulletin reflects society's view that books - those on library shelves, particularly children's book - ought to reflect 'people aged 65 and up' in a favourable light. It then asks libraries how books in their libraries reflect such citizens.]
In a dissertation entitled Ageing and work - problems and solutions in the work place, printed by an American university, the writer wrote, "We face challenges that will only worsen with the passage of time. Like any discipline the easy hurdles are confronted first while the remaining hurdles become progressively more difficult. A basic premise about ageing and work dates from the time of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The Chancellor, faced with the political crisis of destitute elderly living in the streets, arbitrarily picked an age of eligibility for government pensions. The age chosen for retirement pension for German workers was based on the Government's ability to pay pensions for the surviving populace over a given age and not on the basis of functional capacity. In the United States, the retirement age of 65 for Social Security was chosen at a time when the average life expectancy was 62 years. Again, social policy rather than functional ability was the basis on which the retirement age was chosen.
"The effect of social policy is seen also in the efforts to convince U.S. workers that Social Security Retirement Benefits were not welfare but a right that had been earned. As welfare, most U.S. citizens would have shunned Social Security and remained in the workforce. With the baby boom generation entering the workforce older workers had to be convinced that retirement was an acceptable option. Their retirement allowed the economy to absorb the baby boom generation through attrition and expansion."
That said, however, the retirement age in the United States has been raised to 67 years; can age 70 be far behind?
From The Maturing Workforce, we learn that society is moving from a youth-oriented workforce to a mature-oriented one. In the U.S. in the 1930s, mandatory retirement at age 65 years was implemented due to the conditions of those years. One third of the U.S. young workers could not find work; retirement helped open up jobs by creating a work cut-off age. Today, in the U.S. quite the opposite is happening. From The Maturing Workforce, "There are numerous jobs to be filled, but not enough young people to fill them. Over the past ten years the number of young people age 16-24 has dropped by five million each year. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the exceeding number of older people. Today there are 74 million workers over the age of 50. This number is expected to exceed one hundred million within 10 years. Half the workforce is between ages of 35-54 [in five years the average age of the worker will be 41 years old]. By next year, one in every three workers will be 45 or older." [1999 figures]
Interestingly, the United States was not the first country to adopt a social insurance programme. Prior to the Americans seeing the sense of such programmes, Chile, France, Great Britain, Japan, Russia, and Uruguay took up the cause of retirees. [Social Security: Anatomy of a Crisis, 1998] Before 1935, the U.S. had no general retirement programme; individuals tended not to have retirement programmes of their own. Almost as hard as it struck in Canada, the Great Depression caused havoc in the USA; and many senior citizens lost their savings and many of the few pension programmes that were in existence were wiped out. United States president Franklin Roosevelt proposed legislation designed to protect senior citizens from such hardships. The first Social Security cheque recipient, Ida Mae Fuller, generated a great deal of publicity when she received her $22.54 cheque. She had contributed $22 in premiums from her job as a law clerk. Ida Mae Fuller lived for another thirty-five years, far longer than the average life span for the era. Over the course of her life, she received $22,000.
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