ABSTRACT
Some findings are presented from a recent study of older workers and early retirement in the Sheffield steel industry (under the ESRC Ageing Initiative). The study consisted of an analysis of data on retirement and early retirement from the ‘After Redundancy’ project conducted by Iain Noble, John Westergaard, and Alan Walker and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The results reported are intended as a contribution to the debate about early retirement as a mechanism for sharing the current job shortage. They provide a new dimension to this debate because they derive from the experience of a different socioeconomic group and markedly changed labour market conditions to most of the previous research on this issue.
