Ludicrous and unfair: Older workers on the IMF's call to delay retirement

As French workers stage another public show of discontent about President Emmanuel Macron's raising of the state pension age from 62 to 64, the International Monetary Fund has urged governments to encourage older workers to delay retirement.

- Jedidajah Otte

It recommends that people of the baby boomer generation who are fit should stay in work longer to help balance public finances amid fiscal pressures caused by an ageing population. The IMF said: "The 70s are the new 50s" and released data that suggested a person aged 70 in 2022 had the same cognitive function as the average 53-year-old in 2000. Physical health had also significantly improved, the IMF found.

Governments burdened with historically high levels of public debt, the IMF said, could not afford to let growing numbers of older workers leave the workforce while they were still healthy. Instead, it argued, they could encourage workers to delay their retirement, cut early retirement benefits and increase pension ages to rebalance the increasingly precarious ratio of workers and retirees.

Thousands of people from across the globe shared with the Guardian how they felt about such proposals. Although some thought the IMF's idea was good, the vast majority expressed outrage, typically describing the concept that people should retire later to ease fiscal pressures as "disgusting", "ludicrous" and "unfair".