Liam Dann, Business Editor at Large for New Zealand’s Herald, works as a writer, columnist, radio commentator and as a presenter and producer of videos and podcasts.

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I don’t want to oversimplify what’s happening. I’m sure it is intimately intertwined with cost-cutting.

But it is surely changing the nature of those job cuts.

I don’t know what is happening at Spark, but more broadly I’ve heard anecdotes of 50-something software developers and tech support workers being made redundant from well-paid jobs because AI is making it possible for 20-somethings to do the same work much more cheaply.

I have at least five friends who’ve suddenly found themselves unemployed in their 50s.

That’s tough at any age. But in your 50s, there are some specific difficulties.

You might have been quite well paid previously, but that brings a lifestyle with high outgoings: a mortgage that is still to be paid off, teenage children.

Your life is less mobile; you can’t just pack up and head to Australia as you might have done in your 20s.

What does it do to all the national retirement saving equations if people don’t have a safe career path to 65?

It messes them up, is what.

I guess it makes getting started early on retirement saving all the more important.

But for now, we still have a lot of people counting on working until at least 65, and probably longer.

There was another piece of interesting news last week that complicates the labour market outlook in the long run.

New population figures from Stats NZ show New Zealand’s estimated natural population increase was “the lowest since the early 1940s, during World War II”.

I guess Stats NZ added the bit about “World War II” as a reminder that there was famously a shortage of young men around in the early 1940s.

In the year to June, the total fertility rate was 1.51 births per woman (down from 1.57 over the previous 12 months).

If anyone needs a “birds and bees reminder”, the replacement rate is two.

Actually, it’s technically 2.1, as it has to factor in infant mortality.

Our population is still rising. But only just.

Net migration is also at historically low levels – a gain of just 17,600 in the year to June.

So total population growth (0.7%) is more or less stagnating.

That suggests we may still be on a path to labour shortages in the near future.

As the economy picks up, immigration will need to rise too, or we’re going to suddenly find ourselves short of construction workers, tradies and teachers – all sorts of skilled jobs – as we did in the years of Covid border closures.

It would be a brave (or foolhardy) commentator who’d claim to know what the net outcome of these conflicting social and economic forces will be.

I’m not overly pessimistic about the outlook for Generation Alpha (born in the past 10 years) or my own Gen Z children.

Perhaps it’s just naivety at not being able to see that far into the future.

But they do have youth and adaptability on their side.

Unlike my friends and me, they are not constrained by having based their lives on a rule book that was written in the last century.

I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you learn to learn (and don’t forget), you’ll be okay.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”

That prophetic line is attributed to futurist and author Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock.

But what about us oldies? There is no joy in just trying to hang on to a job until you clock out at 65 years old.

Who wants to waste the last working years of their lives in survival mode?

Somehow, we are going to have to front-foot things to compete with AI.

But, to end on a more positive note, this economic downturn might yet move on.

The supply and demand curve of labour market dynamics will shift again.

Older workers may yet come into their own and, if the economy picks up but the population doesn’t, that may well be sooner than we think.

Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.

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