Earlier retirement predicted

Press, 5 March 1980, Page 5

Earlier retirement predicted

PA Auckland Rising umemployment could mean that it becomes increasingly less common for young people aged 20 to 21 to be in full-time jobs, according to a top Australian educationist.

The Chairman of the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, Dr P. Karmel, said that the proportion of people’s lifetimes spent working was steadily declining. In the future, people would start work later and retire earlier, he said.

“While I don’t think it will happen for a while, a working span from 20 to 55 (years old) could be quite possible. “After all, 100 years ago 12-year-olds were working.” Dr Karmel, in Auckland to address the session of ■the New Zealand Employer’s Federation convention,

said permanent full-time jab opportunities for young people were "drying up,” partly because of economic and technological changes. As numbers of full-time jobs decreased, unskilled school-leavers were being supplanted by the better qualified and married women.

Consequently, Dr Karmel disputes the assertions of some employers

that education systems should produce people to blend into the work-force. • “Work occupies only a small fraction of a person’s life,'” he said. “Education must prepare for every day life.” According to Dr Karmel, students should learn skills, such as reading, writing and arithmetic, and what he calls “affective skills” — those which help one to relate with other people and deal with situations.

“I don’t believe that schools should turn out young people solely prepared for a specialised job, such as carpentry or typing,” he said. “That can be learnt at a tertiary institute or in the workforce.”

Schooling should better provide a strong basis which could later be used to start in a wide variety of trades.

With accelerating technological advances, many skills could be obsolete almost before a high school student finished learning them. What they were wrestling with was what they should do with young people before they were able to find full-time work, said Dr Karmel. He believed governments would have to introduce “comprehensive youth policies.”

“If we don’t pay attention to this age-group, a lot of young people will be alienated,” he said. Such policies would replace the dole and allow young people to do a combination of work, study, or social work while paid an appropriated allowance by the State.

“Governments are going to have to put a lot of money into this age-group, anyway,” Dr Karmel said. “If >they are unemployed, they receive the dole, or, if they are studying, they get a bursary.” He sees it as perfectly legitimate for school-lea-vers to drop-out” before taking a job. “They should not be forced to do it, bu<f I see nothing terrible in hiking round New Zealand or living on a beach for a few years.”

Discussing earlier retirements, Dr Karmel said that people forced to give up full-time employment at, for example, the age of 55, would probably still be able to get! part-time work.

“While there has been a marked drop in the number of full-time jobs, there has been a fairly heavy increase in the number of part-time positions available,” he said. “In China, I think workers are already retiring at 55.”