The Potentials of Research and Policies on Active Ageing: From MOPACT and EXTEND to EIWO

Abstract

EIWO – ‘Exclusion and inequality in late working life: Evidence for policy innovation towards inclusive extended work and suitable working conditions in Sweden and Europe’ (start 2020) – is the third project in a series of interdisciplinary projects on ‘ageing in the world of work’. EIWO is being carried out in selective EU-member states that have dealt with how the measuring of ‘success and failure factors’ can be used to extend working life (EWL) at the various levels (micro, meso, and macro). The author of this text is involved in all three projects: work package leader for MOPACT WP 3, principal investigator for EXTEND, and scientific advisor for EIWO. MOPACT WP 3 – Mobilisation the potential of active ageing: Extending working lives (2013 – 2017) – compared EU-wide efforts to extend working life with respect to ‘good practices’ on all levels and served as a starting point for EU-wide recommendations for action. EXTEND – Social inequalities in extending working lives of an ageing workforce: Old and new social inequalities in age-related occupational retirement and pension transitions (2017 - 2019) – focused on social inequalities in the transition phase to retirement and therefore implicitly on socially-selected possibilities and chances of realising a longer working life, including, for example, the professional care sector. EXTEND’s recommendations for action related primarily to preventive measures, above all securing and promoting employability to avoid emerging and/or deepening social inequalities mainly through involuntary/forced early exit. EIWO explicitly takes a life course perspective into account to better recognise and classify exclusion from and social inequalities in the late phases of employment biographies, which have been less pronounced in both MOPACT WP 3 and EXTEND, but with leading insights. This paper places these three projects in an overall context and draws relevant conclusions from the EIWO research perspective aimed at understanding a ‘social life course policy’ that considers employees’ biographies and therefore explicitly a gender perspective as reference points.