A Brief History of Retirement

Retirement is not as you think that it has been around here forever. Most of us do not aware that retirement did not even exist until industry age in Europe which is in the late 1700s, 100+ years ago. There was no such thing as job before the industrial age. As there was no job, there was also no retirement.

Father, Mother, Sons and daughters work together and share the work load for maintaining the farm to keep them survive. This is something like “Clark Kent”, our superman life in the Smallville town. :) I am just kidding. As the fathers got older, they did less and less of the manual hard labour and become less efficient. A lot of manual hard labour tasks were now handled by the stronger sons and this continues to the rest of the generations.

However, the industrial age revolution changed all this by migrating from the farm to factory. In order to maximize productions, factories divided the work into operators, engineers, administrators and so on. Sounds familiar huh? This is what you see today in many companies.

So when the workers become older, he become less effective to the companies as he could do less work. However, the company still need to perform and maximum the production, but this is too cruel to fire them. Therefore the concept of “Retirement’ was introduced where the workers had to retire when he reached a certain age. The concept of pensions was also introduced where the retirees should be able to claim their benefits after retirement. All started in Europe and slowly moving to the rest of the countries.