What Germans Do After Retirement

If he gets a call from the company that employs him, Klaus Beckert goes to work even if it’s one of his days off. When that happens, though, it’s usually to deal with clients, says the 73-year-old, a qualified toolmaker and machinist. Otherwise he sticks to his normal work week routine, which means going in from Tuesday to Thursday – just three days.

Beckert, who lives in Cologne, isn’t thinking of retiring. “It’s not about the money,” he says. “It’s about having work that – even after 40 years -- I enjoy.” Beckert used to work full time for the company, a family-owned technology firm called Henkelhausen GmbH. Now he does part time work as a consultant.

Henkelhausen isn’t the only company that doesn’t want to miss out on the experience older workers bring to the job. According to a recent survey of family-owned companies and young entrepreneurs, nearly 40% of participating companies employ workers older than 40. Medium-sized companies lead the way in employing older folks.

Due to early retirement schemes, many big businesses no longer have any older workers at all. Overall, only every second large company in Germany has any employees over 50. However, the situation looks very different in family-owned businesses: two-thirds of the firms that participated in the survey said that workers aged between 55 and 65 make up over 5% of their entire work force.

For some 13% of those companies, in fact, workers in that age range make up 20% of the total work force. “Because of demographic developments, people in Germany have to work longer,” says Lutz Goebel, president of Familienunternehmer, an advocacy group for family-owned businesses. Moving retirement age to 67 is a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough, he says. According to Gobel, a flexible approach to retirement would work better than just having rigid cut-off rules.