Is your workplace facing a ‘Boomer bottleneck’?

June 4, 2026 — 5:26pm

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Here’s an experiment for you: the next time you’re in a workplace, I want you scan your eyes subtly around the room. Is there anything unusual that you haven’t taken much notice of before? Because there’s something that’s going to be glaringly obvious once I point it out.

Australian workplaces, like the rest of our society, are ageing. Take a good look around many workplaces, and you’re likely to see more older workers continuing to work longer than the traditional retirement age than at any other time in history.

Like most long-term trends, it’s happened so gradually over the last few decades that we hardly noticed the change. People are working longer than ever, and it’s beginning to create problems. One of these is dubbed the “Boomer bottleneck”, and it’s something we need to talk about.

Over the last 20 years, the percentage of older Australians aged over 65 who are continuing to work has more than doubled from 6.1 per cent in 2001 to 15 per cent in 2021, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

When you break it down by gender, it equates to 11 per cent of older women........

© The Age