The economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown risks leading to generational resentment and a widening generational divide if not handled properly. It’s easy to criticise the attitude and behaviour of the younger generations, millennials onwards. But it must also be acknowledged that these generations have been handed a raw deal: they are coming of age when the Mauritian economy was already in decline (with sugar and textiles falling), thrown into precarious employment in a constantly expanding informal sector, the 2008 crash and its effects and now with mass unemployment that could engulf up to 100,000 people to look forward to. These are the generations coming of age when the ‘Mauritian miracle’ has already exhausted itself and now have only a grey, painful hangover in its stead. It’s been a terrible 20 years, economically and socially speaking.

One suggestion that has emerged is making retirement mandatory across the economy at 60 years old. Just a few months ago, in an ageing society with an increasingly heavy pension burden, this would have seemed heresy. Today, with mass unemployment staring us in the face, there is some sense in the government creating employment for the young by retiring off the old, thereby ensuring that in the coming mass layoffs, the brunt of it is borne by the elderly as much as possible. If it is the young that are the ones chiefly being fired, we would be creating a society where not only the assets (houses, land etc.) are concentrated within the ranks of the elderly, but increasingly incomes as well. This would just fan generational resentment, with poor, young, resentful Mauritians with disastrous social and eventually, economic, consequences.

Concentrating mass layoffs as much as possible by pushing elderly workers out of the job market makes a lot of economic sense. For one thing, a worker over 60 who loses his job has a social safety net in the form of the basic retirement pension to fall back on, which is paid even if he is working. The young jobless have no such safety net. For them, losing a job means pauperisation, pure and simple. For companies across the public and private sectors, it would mean saving on wage bills by pushing out elderly workers higher on the income scale with younger workers just starting out. And in the context of Covid-19, whose primary victims are the elderly, a younger workforce is less susceptible to disruption. The final benefit is that since the young are more likely to save to build up assets (buying a house, or car), rather than the elderly (who already owning assets, consume a much greater part of their income) facilitating a generational turnover within the job market has other economic benefits as well.

Despite its obvious benefits, there are some handicaps to realising this policy. The first are some unions who tend to favour “last in, first out” approaches to layoffs that ensure that in any job cutting exercise, older workers are kept on, while younger ones are the ones pushed out. The other is the fact that political incentives in Mauritius are a bit skewed: the elderly vote more regularly and, in an ageing Mauritius, constitute a growing political constituency. So despite paying lip-service to the young, political parties are incentivised to chase elderly voters instead. The last general election, for example, was marked by every traditional party trying to outbid one another in raising the state-pension even though it’s been clear for years that sustaining that is becoming a problem in an ageing society.

What seemed like a heresy just a few months ago, making retirement mandatory at 60, is one of the best tools the government may have in dealing with this latest crisis.

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