Determinants of voluntary early retirement for older workers with and without chronic diseases: A Danish prospective study

Abstract

Aims: This study explored differences in determinants (i.e. health-related, work-related and social factors) of voluntary early retirement between older workers with and without chronic diseases in Denmark. Methods: Workers aged 56–64 years who were members of a voluntary early retirement scheme were selected from the Danish National Working Environment Survey (2008–2009) and were followed in a public register for four years. Cox regression analyses were performed separately for older workers with and without chronic disease to identify the associations between determinants and voluntary early retirement. To explore the differences between groups, an interaction term between the determinant and having a chronic disease was included in the analyses for the total population. Results: Among 1861 eligible older workers, determinants associated with a higher risk of voluntary early retirement included poorer self-rated health, more depressive symptoms, a higher physical workload, lower job satisfaction and lower influence at work. For older workers with a chronic disease ( n=1185), the presence of work–family conflict was also associated with a higher risk of voluntary early retirement, whereas for those with no chronic disease ( n=676), a poorer relationship with colleagues was an additional determinant. Higher emotional demands, a higher work pace and higher quantitative demands were not significantly associated with voluntary early retirement for either group. None of the interaction terms was found to be statistically significant ( p>0.05). Conclusions: Determinants associated with voluntary early retirement did not significantly differ between older workers with or without a chronic disease in Denmark. We conclude that several health-related, work-related and social factors are important for prolonged labour force participation of older workers (with and without a chronic disease).

Work participation and risk factors for health-related job loss among older workers in the Health and Employment after Fifty (HEAF) study: Evidence from a 2-year follow-up period

“…Job dissatisfaction was a dominant risk factor for HRJL among both men and women independent of socio-demographic and lifestyle factors, findings consistent with those from European studies which have shown similar associations between job dissatisfaction [32][33][34] and other poor psychosocial work characteristics (effort-reward imbalance and low job control) [16,24,28,[33][34][35][36][37][38] and exit from work through disability retirement, receipt of disability benefits, or voluntary early retirement. Job satisfaction is a complex multi-faceted phenomenon incorporating perceived aspects of the work and its rewards as compared with its disadvantages.…”

“…Not coping with the physical demands of one's work was an important risk factor for HRJL in our final models for both men and women, robust to adjustment for all other factors and attenuating the association with difficulty managing financially. Other researchers have reported similar results in studies of exit from work through disability retirement, receipt of disability benefits, or voluntary early retirement [13,18,24,[31][32][33][34]. It seems that physically-demanding work (more common among people from more deprived backgrounds) becomes more difficult at older ages and that individuals who perceive a mismatch between what their work requires of them and their physical capacity are more likely to experience HRJL.…”

“…mrc.soton.ac.uk/cmhw/contact-us/). and ability to cope with them [13,18,24,[31][32][33][34]; mental job demands [32]; and psychosocial aspects of work including effort-reward imbalance, job demand and control [16,24,28,[33][34][35][36][37][38], and job satisfaction [32][33][34].…”

“…A combination of free-text terms were used to identify HRJL because disability retirement is not a formal exit mechanism from employment in all countries (the UK amongst them [ 11 ]) and relevant articles might otherwise have been missed. Risk factors identified included: poor socioeconomic circumstances [ 2 , 12 – 16 ], low educational attainment [ 2 , 12 , 14 – 16 ], and difficult financial circumstances [ 14 , 17 ]; lifestyle risk factors and poor health behaviours (smoking [ 18 – 25 ], high alcohol intake [ 19 , 20 ], low physical activity [ 22 , 24 , 26 – 28 ] and obesity [ 16 , 18 , 20 , 27 , 29 , 30 ]); physical demands of work and ability to cope with them [ 13 , 18 , 24 , 31 – 34 ]; mental job demands [ 32 ]; and psychosocial aspects of work including effort-reward imbalance, job demand and control [ 16 , 24 , 28 , 33 – 38 ], and job satisfaction [ 32 – 34 ].…”

Cardiorespiratory fitness, occupational aerobic workload and age: workplace measurements among blue-collar workers

“…construction, manufacturing, service and eldercare) have a greater need for initiatives to reduce the aerobic workload-such as offering tailored exercise at the workplace for sustaining and improving cardiorespiratory fitness (Korshøj et al 2016;Hallman et al 2017;Lidegaard et al 2018;Lund Rasmussen et al 2018). Apart from increasing fitness, tailoring of manual work tasks to the cardiorespiratory fitness of workers may also be a solution for reducing the relative aerobic workload of individual workers-promoting balance between the capacity of workers and their tasks (which, currently, does not seem to be occurring Merkus et al 2019;Oakman et al 2019). Such tailoring would likely focus on equitable distribution in how work tasks are allocated (i.e., relative to capacity), but could also include other work modifications such as increased opportunity for rest breaks, shorter time at work, fewer days at work and help from fitter colleagues.…”