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Women 'should work longer' - expert

By Wang Zhenghua (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-09-10 07:54

SHANGHAI: The retirement age of women should be extended as a solution to this city's shrinking supply of labor and the rapidly aging population, a demographics expert has said.

Gui Shixun, vice-director of the Shanghai Research Center on Aging, said by 2020 men and women should be allowed to retire at age 60.

Currently, women working for government institutions and companies are required to retire at age 55 and men at 60. Women blue-collar workers must retire at 50 and men at 55.

In recent years, economic experts have increasingly warned that the nation's abundant supply of low -cost labor, seen as the backbone of China's phenomenal economic growth, will decrease.

In Shanghai, 20 percent of its population of about 18 million, are now aged over 60, prompting the local government to step up efforts to find a solution.

Gui said Shanghai's working population, or permanent residents aged between 15 and 59, shrank 52,400 to 9.76 million last year, reportedly the biggest decrease in all provinces and municipalities in China.

"The slow growth of the labor force in Shanghai will become more serious," Gui told the Oriental Morning Post newspaper.

Shanghai should grant more permanent resident permits and the one-child policy should be relaxed, he said.

The proposal to have both men and women retire at 60, was put forward a few years ago, but met with mixed reactions.

Bao Yunyun, an office worker, said she would like to retire at an earlier age "so she will have time to do something different".

But an increasing number of women who want to keep their jobs longer regard the current policy, introduced decades ago, as discrimination.

"The early retiring age means fewer social welfare benefits and it's unfair for women," Zhu Dan, a member of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, said in a recent Xinhua report.

To receive the full benefits of government policies usually requires employees to have more than 30 years' service, she said.

Women today are able to work longer than before due to improved working conditions and better health, she said.