Retirement Time and the Temporalities of the Migratory Life Course
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Retirement Time and the Temporalities of the Migratory Life Course Shamette Hepburn 1 Accepted: 18 September 2020/ Published online: 25 September 2020 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Research has shown that forms of inequality are increasing in Canada. However, one often-overlooked form has been the inequality of retirement time, which is the period between labour market exit and the end of the life course. Divergences that persist in retirement time present opportunities for scrutiny given that they often mirror other forms of inequality across the life course. While racialized immigrants are reported to be less successful in the Canadian labour market, very little is known about their lived experiences navigating retirement time after they exit the labour market. This paper utilizes data from 20 Jamaican Canadian retirees (aged 60 and older) that follows their retirement time experiences after long-term labour market participation in Canada, in order to provide the first qualitative study focused on this significant life transition. Underscoring both precarity and agency as important facets of Jamaican Canadians’ retirement time and later life, the paper highlights the interconnections of earlier life course trajectories, livelihood strategies, and their fears of perceived improvidence. It contributes to emergent scholarship on Jamaica’s ageing diaspora, who are among growing cohorts of ageing Caribbean immigrants in Canada. Importantly, it foregrounds their strategic responses to the risks and opportunities that contour this lesser-researched phase of the migratory life course. Keywords Jamaica . Canada . Retirement time . Retirement inequality . Migration
Introduction Retirement time is an important yet overlooked phase of the migratory life course of immigrant older adults. Defined broadly as the number of years between retirement and the end of the life course, retirement time has been found to be increasingly perilous
* Shamette Hepburn [email protected]
1
School of Social Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University, S880, Ross Building South, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada
Ageing Int (2020) 45:434–452
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(Ghilarducci 2015). The concept is distinct from, yet related to retirement which Ghilarducci and Webb (2018) have conceptualized as the “time when individuals have greater control over the pace and content of their time compared to a typical employee” (p. 252). Contemporary retirement time in North America is often circumscribed by inequality and vulnerability, which stems from inadequate pensions and personal savings, ill-health and a shorter life-span (Ghilarducci and Webb 2018; Ghilarducci 2015). These conditions are often borne of one’s socioeconomic status, educational attainment and the interplay of social categories such as race and class. For example, racialized immigrants continue to experience high unemployment rates, deskilling, low income, discrimination and occupational segregation in the Can
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