Do retirees belong to the working class?

Last month, I expounded on what exactly is the working class and who belongs to the working class. A reader reached out to me afterward to suggest that I could’ve expanded on people who are part of the working class but that others wouldn’t generally see them as the working class.

I thought it was a great suggestion, so I’ve decided to do a short series expanding on my original post. Each week, I publish a new post in the series, exploring one of the groups that seems to be sitting outside what people consider to be the working class.

Last week, I explored whether stay-at-home parents are working class, and the week before, I discussed whether self-employed people are working class. This week, I’m answering the question of whether people who are retired are working class.

At first glance, we might be tempted to say no since they’re not working for an employer; however, let’s review what I mean by “working class”.

In last month’s post, I mentioned that belonging to the working class depends on one’s relationship to the means of production: if one owns or controls the means of production, then one belongs to the owning class. Otherwise, one belongs to the working class.

As I indicated last month, means of production is also known in economics as the four factors of production: land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship.

And by that definition, retirees—at least generally speaking—are working class, since they don’t own the means of production.

Now, of course, there may indeed be some retirees who do own the means of production. Perhaps they own a company that employs workers. Or maybe they own a home that they rent to workers. In cases such as those, the retirees wouldn’t be working class—they’d be part of the owning class, since they own land, labour, capital, and entrepreneurship.

But I think it’s safe to assume that people like this make up a small percentage of retirees.

On that note, however, remember that belonging to the owning class or working class has nothing to do with how much you make. You can be a professional athlete making half a million dollars a year and still be part of the working class, but you can be an 85-year-old woman on a pension who rents out her basement and be part of the owning class.

That being said, I imagine most retirees aren’t landowners renting out their properties or company owners extracting value from the labour performed by their workers. A 2020 report from Statistics Canada, for example, showed that 9.5% of couples without children have rental income and only 4.1% of people not in a family have rental income. Even if you add up all family/household types, 7.9% had rental income.

The data isn’t broken down by age, but it’s pretty clear that most households don’t have rental income.

Another dataset from Statistics Canada showed that in 2018, there were 1,327,639 private enterprises in Canada. Of those, 250,615 were owned by someone who was 65 years old or older. That works out to about 18.9%.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t tell us how many of those owners were retired, how many owned more than one of those enterprises, or what percentage of the entire age group was represented by these owners.

So, are retirees working class? Well, probably, but there may be some exceptions.

Remember, “working class” refers to one’s relationship to the means of production, not how much you make or what type of job you have.