Difficulty: If "work is health", in what state can we expect to live in retirement?

The nagging question of pension reform remains invariably associated with the extension of the age of liquidation of rights. However, the chances of pursuing a professional activity beyond the age of 60 remain very strongly linked to the health of seniors.

In 2021, more than a third of French employees believe that work is deteriorating their health, compared to only 23% in Europe. Exposure to noise, dust, chemicals or infectious agents, carrying heavy loads and repetitive hand movements are among the most discriminating physical constraints in France according to Eurofound.

In addition, over the past thirty years, the work has become denser, the rhythms are accelerating, autonomy is reduced. According to the 2015 European survey on working conditions, the social work environment (perception of management, help and support from colleagues, managers, social behaviour, discrimination and social climate in general) has moreover become a major constraint, France being in the last positions among the countries of the European Union in terms of this criterion.

“Does your work affect your health? © Eurofound (2021) / Datawrapper

It is a safe bet that in the event of a further increase in the retirement age, some of these employees will not have the physical or even psychological capacity to remain in employment at later ages. Moreover, the pension reform of 1993 (lengthening the contribution period) had deteriorated the perceived health of people with few qualifications, who were more inclined to experience physically demanding careers.

What then are the consequences of retirement on physical and mental health in France and how can exposure to degraded physical and psychosocial working conditions throughout the professional career be taken into account in this relationship? This is the question we answer in our latest article published in the Annals of Economics and Statistics.

Two competing and very intuitive hypotheses coexist in the literature dealing with the role of retirement on health status.

"Retirement Blues" or a well-deserved retirement?

In a pamphlet particularly virulent against 18th century medicine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau considers that “temperance and work are the best doctors for man”. It is useful to remember that people in employment are on average in better health than those who do not work.

Quite naturally, therefore, the first hypothesis assumes that leaving the labor market leads to a loss of social role, a reduction in social capital and therefore a deterioration in health (reinforced by a loss in terms of standard of living). Anglicisms, such as “retirement blues” or even “unhealthy retirement”, translate this situation in a particularly explicit way.

The work environment also appears to be more cognitively stimulating than retirement. Several authors corroborate this hypothesis and highlight the negative influence of retirement on cognitive abilities, chronic illnesses, depression or mobility.

Loss of social role in retirement can promote depression © Pxhere, CC BY-SA (via The Conversation)

Conversely, the second hypothesis postulates that retirement can free individuals from situations of professional tension and can therefore improve their state of health in the short term. This virtuous circle can be sustainable if individuals have the capacity to invest in their health. Thus, many international empirical studies show that retirement is beneficial for health in Europe and the United States.

How then to decide between these two hypotheses? In reality, the net effect of retirement depends greatly on when it occurs. The positive effect is often associated with early retirement, and mainly concerns individuals who started their career early and are very exposed to the hardship of work, known to have long-term effects on the state of health, in France as in the stranger.

In France, the probability of declaring themselves in poor health is significantly lower for retirees than for individuals who remain in employment at advanced ages. Workers who retire as early as possible improve their cognitive abilities.

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The protective role of retirement

Based on retrospective data from the Health and professional itinerary survey (2006, 2010) by DREES and DARES, our study, which reconstructs all past exposure to working conditions for each year of professional life, confirms these effects.

These working conditions, the role of which is specifically studied in this study, are of two types: physical (night work, repetitive work, physically demanding work and exposure to toxic or harmful products) and psychosocial (full use of skills, work under pressure, tensions with the public, recognition of work at its fair value, balancing work and family obligations, good working relations with my colleagues). We thus construct two synthetic indicators and consider a person as exposed if their degree of exposure is higher than the average.

As expected, the protective role of retirement remains very pronounced among people whose work has been strenuous. For people facing physical constraints, retirement mainly improves general health, while for people who have experienced psychosocial constraints, it more significantly reduces anxiety and depression.

Research has shown that drudgery has long-term health effects © Flickr, CC BY-SA (via The Conversation)

In particular, the most visible effects of retirement are observed in the low-skilled male population exposed to physical constraints, for whom there is a reduction of 21.2 percentage points (pp) in the probability of declaring themselves in poor health. health and 13.7 pp for chronic diseases, 16 pp for activity limitations and 8 pp for anxiety or depression.

More surprisingly, retirement also improves, to a lesser extent, the perceived health of people with little or no exposure and reduces their level of depression and anxiety.

Finally, it should be noted that the beneficial effect of retirement on health does not completely offset the harmful effect of past working conditions on health, especially among the most exposed people.

A malaise of seniors at work

These results question the methods of compensation and the legitimacy of an almost exclusively restorative approach to the deleterious consequences of hard work.

In the absence of prevention policies, various targeted compensation mechanisms have been introduced since the early 2000s. Some recognize the specificity of long careers started early and often stressful (early retirement for long careers introduced in 2003). Others aim to directly measure exposure to the physical constraints of work justifying a derogation from the legal retirement age (Personal hardship prevention account – C3P – in 2014, then reduced in scope to the Personal account of prevention – C2P – in 2017).

These devices appear to be limited to at least two titles. First of all, the differences in life expectancy linked to the differences in exposure to arduous working conditions are only partially compensated. The hardship account, for example, only makes it possible to anticipate retirement by a maximum of two years. However, at the age of 62, recipients of incapacity for work pensions can expect to live almost five years less than retirees from the general scheme.

Life expectancy at age 62 © Pensions Guidance Council (2017 SNSP figures) / Datawrapper

Then, psychosocial risks at work are not taken into account, even though they strongly degrade mental and physical health in France.

The fact that retirement improves everyone's health is therefore undoubtedly indicative of a general malaise at work among French seniors. Maintaining good health at work therefore requires the conduct of more ambitious systemic health policies, acting on the entire life cycle (policy on training, employment, prevention and health at work as well as protection of excluded from the labor market), to get out of a policy of care stricto sensu or compensation ex post.

They must respond to the singular dissatisfaction of French employees in terms of psychosocial risks, the feeling of loss of autonomy and, more fundamentally, the loss of meaning at work. Did not Albert Camus indicate in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) that “there is no punishment more terrible than useless and hopeless work”?

This analysis was written by Thomas Barnay, associate researcher at the Institut Santé-Travail de Paris Est, professor of economics at the University of Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne (UPEC) and Éric Defebvre, lecturer in Economics at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The original article was published on The Conversation website.