Imaginaries of retirement, pension, and precarity: A cultural political economy of low-wage older workers’ extended working lives in Hong Kong

With the policy agenda of pension reforms and activation, the global ageing workforce are increasingly expected to prolong their employment through job retention or re-employment. Despite the growing popularity of extended working lives (EWL) to address economic pressures on the public finance and labour shortage, delaying retirement could transform welfare entitlements and employment relations, institutionally and ideationally rooted in neoliberalism. While previous studies from sociology, social policy, and social gerontology focus on the social determinants of EWL, older workers’ lived experience and normative expectations receive less attention. Two research questions emerge in this study: (1) why and how do older people engage in EWL? (2) in what ways do low-wage mature workers understand their later employment and pension incomes?

Informed by cultural political economy theories, this paper investigates how older workers, who are extending working lives, make sense of the social security system and labour market based on their socioeconomic imaginaries, including the everyday decision making, interest calculation, identity building, and the construal of institutional rules. By conducting 36 in-depth interviews with low-wage older employees in Hong Kong, the findings unpack the material and semiotic forces driving workers into EWL. On the one hand, interviewees’ risk assessment of the financialised private saving accounts and their fear of falling into the social safety net perpetuated workers’ financial needs, given the absence of public pension in Hong Kong. On the other hand, the hegemonic work ethic privileged paid employment for older people contributing to the society and countering the ageist discourses about economic burden. In addition to accepting low job quality due to limited choices in their later career, mature workers’ EWL practices were constrained by their predictive and actual health condition. It was suggested that older employees’ workability and employability was considered far beyond their control. Hence, low-wage older workers’ imaginaries about the future were uncertain and they tended to unceasingly work without retirement plans, leading to the power asymmetries in the workplaces and shifted business costs to workers. Legitimised by Hong Kong’s productivist welfare model and liberal labour market, EWL are arguably entangled with the threefold precarity in terms of work, welfare, and health. This paper theoretically contributes to social policy by reconceptualising EWL from a cultural political economy perspective on socioeconomic imaginaries, while the worker-centred analysis problematises the promotion of EWL as a good and low-cost policy approach to workforce ageing in a non-Western context.