Colloquium: Employment trajectories as X and Y and their implications for social inequality - by dr. Mark Visser (Radboud University)

Abstract: As a response to population aging and in order to keep public pensions affordable, many countries have implemented policies to encourage longer working lives. The Dutch government abolished early retirement schemes and increased the state pension age. However, not everyone might be able and willing to continue working into old age. Older workers with low educational qualifications and in lower-class jobs could be particularly disadvantaged. As more and more older people remain attached to the labor force in later career stages, old-age inequality could be rising if older workers with low levels of education and low social status experience negative consequences of old-age policies and run high risks of being excluded from the labor market. Moreover, this may increase inequality between households, especially when both partners face disadvantages in later life. Applying a life course perspective, two innovative applications of (multichannel) sequence and cluster analysis are shown. The first application uses employment trajectories of older workers as independent variable (X) to predict (early) retirement. The second application uses employment trajectories of older couples as dependent variable (Y). Both examples show pronounced disparities between the lower and higher educated and between those from lower and higher social classes. It is concluded that social inequality is likely to increase in the context of the recent policy changes.

Bio: Mark Visser is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). His research interests include the life course perspective, older workers, social capital, social inequality and the welfare state. He has published on these topics in both international and national journals. In 2019, he was awarded the Jowell-Kaase Early Career Researcher Prize.