Our Mission
Respectful Exits brings together engaged aging workers and age-inclusive employers to insure that the growing longevity of our workforce leads to extended work and livable rather than lethal retirements. We are transforming broken 20th century workplace habits into innovative 21st century policies and practices.
Our Assumption
Respectful Exits leads a social advocacy campaign that identifies business policy and practice as the primary driver in how Americans work and retire. Other organizations focus on government action and the public policies that guide them. We believe that the conditions of work and retirement by millions of American employers over the last three decades are the result of a host of short-sighted and incremental decisions made by employers and facilitated by government inaction. Their impact has left a massive cohort of retirees in a situation summarized well in a Wall Street Journal headline:
“A Generation of Americans Is Entering Old Age the Least Prepared in Decades: Low incomes, paltry savings, high debt burdens, failed insurance—the U.S. is upending decades of progress in securing life’s final chapter”
The future of today’s and tomorrow’s retirees rests in our hands. The choice is simple, summed up by Benjamin Franklin:
“We must, indeed, all hang together or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”
Significant change is required, and great changes only occur when people in large numbers and responsive organizations come together to chart a new course.
The Path Forward
To change policies and practices that have been decades in the making will require a sustained campaign of education, persuasion and collective action.
- As an aging worker you will need to abandon the passivity that comes from accepting your fate in isolation and become active collaborators in shaping your future.
- As an employer burdened with outmoded systems that waste human resources, emerging talent pools and accumulated knowledge, you will need to break the mold and reverse decisions whose unforeseen consequences threaten social progress.
Working together, we can implement the achievable, affordable and measurable elements of the Longevity Agenda. This site outlines a range of activities and tools that are designed to transform the way aging workers are developed, contribute and retire.
As we set out on this inspiring journey, we cannot anticipate what will happen as we form this great force for change. What we can see is the bleak future that awaits us if we do not take up the challenge.