Never Retire - How Part-Time Work Can Affect Physical and Mental Health
Reviewing research from Sweden we can apply at the individual level
This week I’ll send out part four of our working in retirement series to paid newsletter subscribers.
It’s called—The (hopefully) Fluid Nature of Working in Relative Old Age—and will focus on the different ways working in retirement can look, from perfect world scenarios to real life on the ground circumstances.
As I prepared and sent out part three—Health and Well-Being Research on Working in Relative Old Age—I realized there was far more academic research on working in retirement (and related topics) then I could cover in one post. So I set up a Google Scholar alert to send me the latest papers published in the broad retirement space.
I’m excited to pick the most interesting research and summarize it here in the newsletter and on Medium going forward.
One of the things I love about academic research beyond its rigorous nature is that it often teaches or tells me about something I didn’t know. I marvel at the things professors study, which is great, because they can help introduce nuance and keep our conversations fresh.
With that in mind, I’ll keep this post free and summarize an article that caught my eye.
Working less by choice: what are the benefits and hardships
Ola Persson, Jörgen Larsson & Jonas Nässén (2022) Working less by choice: what are the benefits and hardships?, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 18:1, 81-96
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15487733.2021.2023292
The title of the article explains it all. The research provides insight into the broad discussions we have around Never Retiring, semi-retirement, and working in retirement.
First, here’s something I didn’t know existed. Though I’m not surprised it exists where it does. If only we had—or at least seriously considered—these types of policies in the United States.
Within the Swedish municipal sector, there is a long history of part-time work among employees. However, the extensive use of part-time work has been subject to increasing criticism from a gender-equality perspective, as it is mainly women who work part-time, resulting in lower salaries and – as a consequence – lower retirement incomes. To address these issues, the City of Gothenburg decided in 2011 to offer full-time contracts to all of its 50,000 employees. However, for those who did not want to – or could not – work a full 40 hours per week, a second policy was implemented in 2015 that gave all employees in the City of Gothenburg the right to request reduced work time (down to 50% of full-time hours) regardless of motive. The policy states that line managers are not allowed to deny a request to work part-time without first trying to find a solution with the aid of the human-resources department. From the municipality, these work-life policies are formulated as a “right to full-time work, with the option to work part-time”. Thus, the policy allows for an individual and voluntary decision for WTR and where the reduction in working hours comes with a proportional salary cut.
While the inequality aspect of this study is interesting, we won’t cover it here given that it’s outside our focus. That said, you can read the entire article for free at the link if you’re interested.
For our purposes, we focus on quality of life associated with working part-time, which is the situation many of us find ourselves in now if we’re semi-retired or could find ourselves in if we choose to work into our traditional retirement years—or both.
Here’s how the authors of the study thought about quality of life ahead of presenting their results. Note that to make for an easier read, I have excluded citations from the excerpts I include. Here again, see the entire paper for sources and further reading.
Working less may improve quality of life in several ways. First, long working hours negatively impact work-life balance. Additionally, excessive working time has negative consequences for health and well-being due to increased stress and work-related accidents. With this in mind, working less is likely to counter these tendencies and restore work-life balance. Second, WTR can increase “time affluence” – meaning the opposite of living under time pressure – which has been shown to reduce anxiety, to improve social relations, and to increase time spent on physical activities. Finally, WTR can lead to more time being devoted to family, friends, and leisure activities which are time use categories that researchers have identified as beneficial for well-being. Empirically, Lepinteur (2019), for example, identified quality-of-life improvements for reforms where salaries remained the same but the effects are more inconclusive in cases where salaries have been proportionally reduced.
I like that term time affluence. You might seem it come up in future Medium articles and newsletter posts.
It’s part of the reason why I’m so big into semi-retirement, which, in my specific case, means working part-time hours now—at age 46—amid a relatively low cost of living with the plan being to work for the duration.
Having overworked myself in the past, I truly believe this approach improves physical and mental well-being, which, if all goes well, might just increase our ability to actually work in relative old age. It’s what you do with the time you don’t spend working that increases well-being and quality of life. Maybe you’re exercising more, traveling frequently, cooking healthy meals at home, having more sex, relaxing in general, and so on.
Anyhow, the researchers conducted a survey in 2016 of part-time municipal workers in Gothenburg.
…we identified 3,331 employees who all received an individual e-mail explaining the purpose of the study and a link to the Internet-based survey. In total, 994 persons responded to our survey, giving a response rate of 30%. For both the total sample population and those responding to the survey, the mean age and gross salary were the same: 48 years old and a monthly income of (euro)3,200 (US$3,600), respectively. Within the municipal workforce, 78% are women, but among those who had utilized the right to part-time policy, 88% are women. In other words, women are somewhat over-represented among employees who opt for WTR. The gender ratio of responses to our survey (85% female) is approximately consistent with this proportion.
The two following tables from the paper provide a nice summary of the results.
Looking at specific results, 68 percent of respondents either “completely agree” or “agree” with the statement, It is now easier to find time to do everything I want, or need, to do in my private life.
This makes me think about the upside of the stay-at-home portion of the pandemic for many people.
Talk about time affluence.
Without work—or at least under different working conditions (at home)—a meaningful number of people finally had the time and space to do things working all of the time effectively prohibited.
More than half of the respondents said part-time work helped them feel well-rested when they arrive at work; gave them more energy for work, even at day’s end; and improved their health, compared to when they worked full-time.
Of course, some people in the study also reported negative effects of part-time work, particularly around the impact of reduced income.
These people noted that it became more difficult to make ends meet and caused them concern over how much they would be able to save for retirement. Not surprisingly, lower-income workers expressed these worries more than individuals with higher incomes.
Bottom line—if you can craft a viable personal financial plan to work less now, there’s a good chance you can improve your physical and mental well-being, thereby increasing the chances you will be able to work into relative old and enjoy more of life today and going forward into relative old age.
Not just because of this study, but because of the larger body of research and good old fashioned common sense.
In any event, thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this installment and want access to paid posts, please consider subscribing for $5/month or $50 a year.
As always, thanks for helping to support my work as a freelance writer. I appreciate it.
Rocco