Legislation intended to allow employees work until they qualify for the State pension will not be enough for many of the workers who want, or need, to defer retirement, a Siptu official who fights cases on the issue at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and Labour Court believes.
“This won’t be the end of it,” says Rachel Hartery of the Employment (Contractual Retirement Ages) Bill 2025, a piece of legislation intended to address a situation in which people find themselves caught for a time between having to retire from work and being entitled to their State pension, currently on reaching 66. “People are definitely going want to work later.”
With the legislation still pending, a steady stream of cases involving workers wanting to work beyond their 65th birthday continue to be heard at the WRC and Labour Court.
Recent decisions on the issue include one from the WRC in which a warehouse worker, Eugene McEnery, at Partners in Logistics, was found not to have been discriminated against when he was forced to retire five months after his 65th birthday when he declined an extension based on reduced hours.
The Labour Court, meanwhile, overturned a WRC decision and awarded €18,000 to Liam Murphy, who had worked as a general operative at Deepak Fasteners in Shannon, Co Clare, for 45 years but whose request to stay on beyond his 65th birthday was refused by the company.
In another case, the Labour Court reduced an award for discrimination made to Patrick O’Callaghan against his employer, Ferrero Ireland, by €5,000, to €15,000, with aspects of the company’s position described as inconsistent to the point of being “incomprehensible” but the firm is now seeking a judicial review of the decision in the courts.
What the various cases highlight is that the outcomes are often dependent on how carefully the company has considered and implemented its own policies and that cases can be won even where there are apparent inconsistencies.
As in the instance of Denise Murphy, an administrative worker at the Royal College of Surgeons, who was found not to have been discriminated against when refused a second extension despite being able to point to the fact that the college employed up to 27 people who had been retained beyond 66.
The college told the WRC it had done so because those people were in technical or academic roles and were much harder to replace.
Whether a role is physically demanding or not is regularly a factor in cases too, with safety issues often cited, as they were in the McEnery case.
John Murphy, who took a case against Bausch and Lomb and initially returned to work after mediation while the company changed its policies and allowed other workers to stay on, admits the lack of any physically aspect to his job on production at the firm’s Waterford plant was one reason he was so keen to extend his working life.
“I was physically well, I keep myself fit,” says Murphy, who was represented by Hartery in the WRC and the Labour Court, where he was ultimately awarded €2,000 when he sought a further extension at 68.
“I loved my job so I wanted to stay on but there was a financial part to it, too, I went to get a medical card and was told I wasn’t entitled to one until I was 70 after more than 40 years working, so there was that. I’d have the odd visit to the doctor or the dentist and they add up if you are paying for them out of your pension.”
Murphy’s position is fairly typical of the sort of motivations driving people to work longer, says Laura Bambrick, head of social policy and employment affairs at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu).
“If you look at it, there’s a lot of people hitting life’s milestones a lot later,” she says. “They’re having second families, they’re buying homes later, so the mortgage is going later. The children are being born later, so the parents are bankrolling them for longer.
“So there is often a desire to stay on in your job for longer but there is also, for many people, the financial necessity to do it.”
The new Bill, currently working its way through the Oireachtas and which is expected, Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke has said, to come into effect early next year, will go a long way towards addressing one particular reason many people currently wish to work beyond their scheduled retirement age of 65 – that they cannot get a State pension for another year.
It will allow the majority of private-sector workers – most in the public sector can already stay on until 70 – to tell their employers they want to remain in place for that time and employers will have more limited scope to decline the request.
“The onus would be on the employer to defend the right to refuse the employee’s request. We are very clear on that,” Mr Burke said last month. “The threshold is very high in terms of fines and the reasonable justification.”
While there are exceptions, the new law should substantially change the landscape, agrees Bambrick.
People will not be compelled to work the extra year and it is impossible to know how many will but some 4,500 65-year-olds received the specific Department of Social Protection payment intended to tide them over to State pension age last year and it seems clear many of these lacked an alternative.
A number of employers have already revised their retirement policies in anticipation of the legislation, which had originally been expected to be enacted by the last government.
“We have already seen a small bit of an uptick in the number of companies informing employees as a whole that they can retire either at their contractual retirement age or 66. Other companies are managing it on a request-by-request basis,” says Nichola Harkin, head of employment law services at Ibec.
“For traditional reasons the most common contractual retirement age will be 65 but I would say that employers are quite frequently giving employees a post-retirement fixed-term contract to bring them to 66 or maybe even a longer one than just one year.”
Even after the new legislation comes in, she says there will continue to be instances in which employers have legitimate reasons for preferring not to extend the terms of some employees.
Goals such as intergenerational planning, the creation of a more balanced workforce or health and safety are all provided for in both the Bill and the existing code of practice on longer working.
The WRC cases, it seems, will likely continue.