The retirement party has a strange grammar: it celebrates a person by ending their usefulness. Speeches inventory forty years of judgment, relationships, and craft, and then the organization deletes its access to all three by close of business. The employee is meant to feel honored. Many feel amputated. The mistake was made decades earlier, in the design: a career shaped as a cliff, full intensity until an arbitrary Friday, then zero.
Semco attacked the shape itself with a program Ricardo Semler called retire-a-little. As he has told it, an employee of 35 could buy back one day a week, at a proportional pay cut, to do now what they were postponing to 65: the guitar, the child, the surfboard. In exchange, they earned the right to work one day a week after 65 if they wanted the money back. The company was arbitraging an absurdity it had noticed in the standard life plan: people sell all their healthy decades to buy leisure they will receive when least able to spend it. The reported result was the program paying for itself: those who joined stayed longer, and produced more in four days than others did in five.
The cliff wastes exactly what economies are running out of
The demographic arithmetic has turned Semco's curiosity into policy urgency. The OECD projects that without productivity gains or policy change, population aging will slow per-capita GDP growth across member countries by roughly 40 percent, from 1 percent a year (2006-2019) to 0.6 percent (2024-2060). Its Employment Outlook estimates that merely reducing older workers' exit rates from employment to the level of the best-performing decile of countries would add at least 0.2 percentage points of annual per-capita growth in about half of OECD countries. The cliff, multiplied across millions of careers, is now macroeconomically visible.
And the cliff is self-reinforcing, because organizations quietly stop investing in people they expect to delete. Only a third of adults aged 60 to 65 participated in training in 2023, against more than half of those aged 25 to 44. Read those numbers together and the standard story, older workers fade, reverses: the system defunds them first, then cites the fade. The OECD is blunt that age stereotypes themselves damage company performance.
Tapering is an engineering problem, and it has been solved before
The reflex objection is that work cannot be re-dosed, that jobs come in one size. The recent evidence on working-time redesign says otherwise. The largest four-day-week intervention study to date, published in Nature Human Behaviour, followed 2,896 employees across 141 organizations in six countries through six-month trials of reduced hours at full pay: burnout fell and job satisfaction, mental health and physical health improved, a pattern absent in comparison companies. The authors are careful about what the treatment was: not merely subtracting a day, but reorganizing the work first, then reducing hours. Dose and design, changed together.
That is precisely the retire-a-little insight, applied at the other end of the career. If a workweek can be redesigned around 80 percent time for thirty-year-olds without losing output, then a glide path of four days, then three, then advisory days for sixty-somethings is not utopian; it is the same operation with a different denominator. What blocks it is not feasibility but a binary employment imagination: on the payroll at full throttle, or gone.
What the taper preserves
The case for tapering is not charity toward the old; it is retention of assets that leave through the front door. The mentoring literature adds a detail worth noticing: the benefits of mentoring run to the mentor as well. Ghosh and Reio's meta-analysis found that people who mentor report higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment than those who do not. Usefulness, it turns out, is not just something organizations extract from seniors; it is something seniors metabolize. A structure that keeps an experienced person teaching two days a week is simultaneously a knowledge-transfer mechanism and a well-being intervention, paid for out of salary the person voluntarily traded for time.
The deeper point Semler's program made is that time, not money, is the scarce asset on both ends of a career, and the exchange rate between them should be negotiable throughout, not fixed by a formula written for factory shifts. Retire from the job by all means: the badge, the commute, the Sunday dread. But usefulness was never the job's property. It belongs to the person, it compounds with age in every domain that runs on judgment, and the only thing that actually retires it is a system too rigid to buy it in smaller denominations.
Sources
- OECD (2025). OECD Employment Outlook 2025. Aging will slow OECD per-capita GDP growth ~40% absent policy change; matching best-decile older-worker retention would add ≥0.2pp annual growth in about half of members; only one-third of 60-65 year olds trained in 2023 vs more than half of 25-44. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-employment-outlook-2025_194a947b-en.html
- Fan, W., Schor, J., Kelly, E. & Gu, G., Nature Human Behaviour (2025). Work time reduction via a four-day workweek. Six-month trials, 2,896 employees, 141 organizations, six countries: burnout down, satisfaction and health up; effects reflect redesign plus hour reduction. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
- Ghosh, R. & Reio, T., Journal of Vocational Behavior (2013). Career benefits associated with mentoring for mentors: a meta-analysis. Mentors report higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment than non-mentors. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2013.03.011