Age, Policy Changes and Work Orientation: Comparing Changes in Commitment to Paid Work in Four European Countries

Due to ageing populations and a future shortage of labour active people, there is a political ambition to prolong people’s work force activities in Europe. The question of this paper is to what degree policy changes aimed at prolonging people’s working lives have been successful in influencing peoples’ commitment to paid work during the studied period of time? The age patterns of non-financial employment commitment (EC) and organisational Commitment (OC) are examined from the perspective of policy changes in four European countries, using ISSP-data collected in 1997 and 2005 from Denmark, Great Britain, Hungary and Sweden. Because of hypothesised country and group differences in visibility and proximity of policy measures taken to increase labour market participation among older workers, Danish and Swedish people were expected to display some degree of general and intended attitudinal response to the policy changes and that the British and Hungarian response would be more gender divided. The results showed that policy changes overall had little intended effect on people’s attitudes to work. Instead, EC dropped dramatically in Hungary for all men from the age of 30 and over, and for Swedish men and Danish women in the 45–53 age group. OC decreased for Swedish men in the age 54 and over, and for Danish women in the 45–53 age group. The main exceptions were British and Hungarian women that displayed unchanged or even an increase in EC in the age group 54 and over.