By Nicky Le Feuvre
Nicky le Feuvre is a full professor and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lausanne.
Nicky will tell us the story of Chantal, a middle-aged and working woman. She is facing the dilemma of what to do with her professional career. What are the impacts of encouraging older workers, especially women, to take early retirement?
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It's a sunny, chilly autumn Monday morning in Switzerland and a smart, middle-aged woman, Chantal, is standing on the platform of Morges train station, waiting with hundreds of other commuters for the 7.05 train to Geneva. Chantal shivers in the early-morning breeze; she has been taking this train for over 25 years, ever since she got a job as a clerk at Swiss bank, just after her divorce from her first husband, Frank.
Somehow though, she seems to be feeling the cold more these days - heavens, she's starting to sound like her mother, who was always putting the heating up, to the eternal despair of her father. Of course, that's when she's not having hot sweats, something that started three or four years ago, and that is so embarrassing, especially as it always seems to happen in really important meetings and makes it so hard to concentrate on the what her boss is asking her to do. And also, at night-time, when she sometimes wakes up with her sheets absolutely soaking. lt was really quite frightening and so tiring to be woken in the middle of the night. Perhaps that's the only positive thing to come out of David's death last year; David, her second husband, who died within 6 months of being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He didn't have the time to notice how much her body was changing, the weight she has put on, or even those awful hot flushes. He had other things on his mind. He was also going through so much pain and was so worried about how his kids were going to manage once he was gone.
His beloved kids, her three step-children, are of course grown up now, but he was always concerned that they would never forgive him for leaving their mother when they were teenagers. Of course, Chantal only met David when his kids were already grown up, and they didn't actually get married until a few years later. So, they only had about 15 years together; such happy times and such a watershed in her life. She really misses him so much. Until she met David, she didn't have much confidence in herself. She started working in ministrative jobs as an apprentice, having left school on with the blessing of her parents, who firmly believed that a young woman didn't really need an education, since she was ultimately destined for marriage and motherhood. With hindsight, Chantal always regretted not having listened to the advice of her teachers, who wanted her to continue her studies. She always feels that she isn't taken seriously by her colleagues or bosses, because she didn't have the formal qualifications. She actually met her first husband, Frank, just after she completed her apprenticeship. She was working as a secretary for a construction company and he as in sales, already moving up the career ladder and clearly ambitious; that's probably what attracted her to him in the first place. Franck was doing a lot of overtime and that's why they decided that she should go part-time, just 2% days a week, because he needed someone to take care of the house, the shopping, cooking, entertaining his clients and all the rest.
Of course, they were planning to start a family straight away, although things didn't turn out at all as they had hoped. After three years of trying for a baby, they did discuss adoption, but Frank wasn't the kind of guy who wanted to bring up 'someone else's child), as he used to say. So, when IVF treatment became available, that seemed like the perfect solution. The treatment was so demanding, and exhausting, that she actually resigned from her job at that point. Frank was earning good money by then and she secretly hoped to be able to dedicate all her time and energy to the long-awaited baby,' Unfortunately, after 2 miscarriages, Chantal realized that her hopes of founding a family would never be fulfilled. At this point, things were becoming increasing difficult with Frank and when he announced that he wanted a divorce because he had met someone else at work, it was really difficult to come to terms with; she felt such a failure. She also felt so guilty about not being able to give Frank the family he craved, and she had no job to fall back on. lt was only after months of depression that her doctor suggested that she should go back to work and start her life over again. After all, she was still young.
It was after that really bad time in her life that she joined Swiss bank, on quite a low salary' lt was there that she met David, her future second husband, who was the manager of the team in the office next door. They soon started chatting over coffee and he encouraged her to sign up for a training course that the bank had just set up. Swiss bank wanted to get more women into middle management positions, and Chantal saw this as an opportunity to compensate for leaving school so early.
She really enjoyed the course, despite having to work in the evenings and at weekends' As soon as she had finished, she was given the task of preparing the bank for the introduction of a new electronic system for private clients. lt was an exciting time and Chantal had to learn a lot in very short space of time.
ln her private life, she was very happy with David, although they didn't move in together for quite some time, because he needed to have time with his kids at the weekend, especially as things got a bit messy with his ex-wife when they started talking about financial arrangements and preparing for divorce. David knew that he would be "splitting" his occupational pension with his ex-wife, since she had also reduced her hours to more-or-less two days a week when their kids were at school.
And now David was gone... Chantal stares out of the window as the train pulls into Geneva station. She sees the poster inviting voters to adopt the AVS21 pension reform plan that the Federal Government is proposing. Chantal knows that this includes the quite controversial measure of increasing the legal retirement age for women up from 64 to 65 years, just like for men. She's listened to the arguments and had more or less decided to vote in favor of the reform next Sunday, September 25th. However, that was before the discussion she had with her boss last week; something that she hadn't really been expecting. Of course, she knew that the bank was looking to reduce costs, but she really had no idea that they were still targeting older workers, and encouraging them to take early retirement... And no, she's feeling so insecure again. And so unclear about what is expected of women of her age in the Swiss context. She can understand that the government wants women to work longer, particularly women like herself who don't have a husband to fall back on and who have such a checkered employment history that their.occupational pension will be quite low... And yet, at the same time, her employer doesn't seem so enthusiastic at the idea of keeping its' older workers, and particularly not of training them to learn the new technology.
And what would she do with her days if she were to retire early? She has no children, no grand-children to look after. No hobbies to speak of. Most of her time has been dedicated to the bank, and then to looking after David when he fell ill. Torn between the policy context (extending women's retirement age) and the policies of the bank, where older workers are being encouraged to retire early.
Chantal, like many other women of her generation, is facing a dilemma: what will she do?