Does a “low-hire, low fire economy” mean low growth in our economy. I am not an economist, just an ordinary person who reads statement such as this and wonders whether it means frustration to our plans for growth.

I thought this article would be about AI and the terror among those around me that their jobs will be replaced by a new say of doing things “artificially“. Artificially for many people spells job insecurity. Immobility for those over 50s looks like a threat!

But this article does not talk of job losses but of lack of change, and concern and that it is getting old not getting smart that is slowing change.

Stefano Scarpetta, director of the OECD’s employment, labour and social affairs directorate, said it was striking that employment rates remained high, and labour shortages widespread, despite a long period of relatively slow growth and high uncertainty.

One big reason fewer people were moving jobs was demographic, he said.

“We know that older workers are less mobile . . . they are more settled, less keen to move geographically, they may find it difficult to negotiate higher pay in a new job if they have experience but not formal education.

All European countries are ageing, and mobility is influenced by ageing.”

I totally get this. But the article misses one thing we live with, which is the inability of the 55+ generation, those who can take their savings and stop working to do just that. We can’t because on average those in their sixties  have saved about £100,000, which after paying tax on most of it, will only replace a few years of work pay. The vision of early retirement turns out to be a chimera.

There is in pensions a much-used term “glidepath” which is something that starts to “pension savings” at something around 50 and takes people to “retirement” five or ten years later and has been devised for a vision of “DC pensions” that takes people out of work and into something else – retirement. This is the vision that pension communication sells to the younger worker. I was doing it when I was a young man and now , like those of my age (my cohort) , I find myself “immobile”.

I do not mean we cannot get about, talk to the bosses at First Bus and Stagecoach and they will tell you that the average bus driver joins their workforces in their forties. The article talks of those with experience but without formal education, I think of bus-drivers , you might think of your equivalent but we all know that most are not accumulating the means to become mobile and leave. The oldest drivers are in their eighties and going strong (fact from Monty Hadadi ) – talk to John Hamilton of Stagecoach and he will tell you that his company are not stepping away from retirement plan, they may not accrue DB (much) but like all low education , highly experienced workforces, these workforces have pensions on their mind.

Of course Royal Mail is the workforce knows the best. A workforce that is most known in pension circles for accruing pension en masse, not in a guaranteed scheme but in a pension scheme that pays income based on investment. It is hugely threatened by digitalisation but I still see a lot of post people replacing people driving to the shops.

Where I see the workforce most at threat is in the high street. I am today in Shaftesbury visiting my family. They explain that in a country town their is now but one not five banks on the high street, that people have a post office and a NatWest but no more. Banking has to be digital for everyone and there are no new jobs in the north of Dorset for banking staff.

So we see a bifurcation of the population between those who can become mobile in digital terms (working from home) , those who are able to work with little formal education who do not find it easy to work from a laptop but are active and those who are having to try to retire without the means to do so. The number of people I know who are “retiring early” is nothing like what I was taught and what I preached as the end game for those over 55.

Of course we want productivity and of course we need capital to make it happen. But the glidepath we – the over 50s- is on sees us pulling up the drawbridge on investment. We have found ourselves in a pension system which is a chimera – promising mobility it actually ties us to work because we cannot afford to leave our jobs.

We find that the banks are no longer on the high street, that the stores we used to rely on are now replaced by grocery vans and Amazon and Royal Mail delivery people. My generation digs in our heels;  we don’t want to be a part of mobility in which our past is lost and our futures look uncertain and unpaid – even by our pension!

We go where the bread is