Under TfL's current policy, when a worker reaches retirement age but wishes to carry on working, they must prove they ares still competent enough to do the job, and successful workers are allowed to stay on in part time employment.
The unions have always agreed with this policy. But a change in legislation last October made age discrimination illegal. There are workers able and willing to carry on full-time work after retirement age, who are currently fighting TfL's retirement policy.
What should the unions say about this? We need to defend workers from age discrimination. In our capitalist society, life is oriented so much around paid work that we cannot blame individual workers if they wish to carry on with work and can only see no other way of giving life meaning.
But retirement is a concept very much under attack at the minute: from the attacks on public sector pensions that happened last year, to the private pension contributions that have been gambled away on the stock market, to the government's plan to raise the state retirement age to at least 67, and our own recent strike ballot over ill-health pensions.
We cannot lose sight of the essential fight for a life beyond work, where we actually get to live our lives as we are meant to, after giving our best years to our employers.
