Davies Ndumiso Sibanda, Labour Matters

Many able-bodied people are retired when they reach “retirement” age to the disadvantage of organisations and are replaced with less qualified people.

In Zimbabwe, there is no legal retirement age. 

Many people have wrongly concluded that the retirement age is 60 or 65 years. 

That is not true.  The Labour Act Chapter 28:01 has left the decision as to when people can retire to individual employers and (National Employment Councils) NECs. 

It must be noted that retirement age and pensionable age are two different things as I have addressed in one of my earlier articles. 

Pensionable age as well, is also not provided for in the Labour Act. 

It is a matter between employers, employees and respective underwriters.

Not long ago, a friend sent me an anonymous clip as to why organisations should recruit people over 60 years. 

It was about an American study which showed that those people over 60 years are more productive than those below. 

The study showed that your most productive people are those between 60 – 70 years, the second most productive are those between 70 -80 years and the third are those from 50 – 60 years.  The article went on to look at the average age of (Chief Executive Officers) CEOs of Fortune 500 companies which is 63 years, the average age of Nobel Peace winner is at 62 years, the average age of a Pastor in the top 100 biggest churches in America is 71 years, the average age of the Pope is at 76 years. 

Another study allegedly also found that employees reach potential at 60 years and continue up to 80 years. 

So, it means that if you have workers between 60 and 70 or 70 – 80 years you really have good workers. Without going into the accuracy of the facts in the article, there is a measure of truth which actually have complications in how we decide to dispose of our people in the name of retirement. 

I do not agree with the thinking that people should be retired when they get to 60 or 65 years.  Employers have to look at retirement as a form of asset disposal.

Asset disposal is serious business which requires more than just saying you are 60 or 65 years and therefore you have to go home and rest. The principles used in asset disposal decision-making must be applied when retiring people as they are assets like any other asset we use in the organisation.  Why should disposal of other assets be driven by business considerations and when it comes to disposal of people, those do not apply. 

We have seen many organisations going down after sending a CEO home because he has reached retirement age and the sending off will be at the wrong time in the interest of the business. 

Thus, the business performance suffers. 

Further, I have seen many organisations recall retired engineers and artisans when things start going wrong after their retirement and as soon as they come back  problems are solved. 

I know of a city whose water and sewer systems collapsed after the retirement of key plumbing staff and for things to normalise, the retired employees had to be recalled to come and fix the mess.

In conclusion, this is an area that needs a lot of interrogation by individual employers, employers’ organisations and trade unions if organisations are to maintain productivity and avoid getting rid of skilled individuals when they are at their peak.

Davies Ndumiso Sibanda can be contacted on: email: [email protected]