Arduous Work, Labour Market Exit and Mortality: A Register Study of Finnish Late Careers

Aart-Jan Riekhoff , Finnish Centre for Pensions
Anu Polvinen, Finnish Centre for Pensions

Many countries have introduced reforms with the goal of extending working lives. While working longer is possible for those in good health and in jobs with adequate working conditions, those who work in demanding jobs are exposed to higher risks of exiting the labour market or dying before even reaching retirement age. This study investigates the relation between physically demanding work and those risks, as well as addresses one potential solution: by timely changing to a less arduous occupation, can workers in arduous jobs work and live longer? We use full population register data from the Finnish Centre for Pensions and follow workers born in years 1955-1959 from ages 50 to 62, or until they permanently stop working or die (N persons = 190,774, N person-years = 2,254,598). We utilize occupation-level job exposure matrices and create a summary indicator of occupation arduousness by applying principal component analysis to nine physical workload factors. Using discrete-time survival analysis, we estimate associations of individuals’ occupations’ arduousness and changes in arduousness with the risks of labour market exit and death during the follow-up. We find that working in more arduous occupations at age 50 substantially increases the subsequent risks of exit and death, although the effect is reduced after controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. Changing to less arduous occupations seems to have little impact on these risks, except for those who start out in the most arduous occupations. These findings have implications for the design of pension systems and labour market policies for older workers.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues