Media Releases > Press Articles 2002

Older workers at a cross road around the world

From: Fifty-Plus News, November 2002, p4

Veronica Sheen from COTA Australia has told an international Ageing Workforce conference in Finland about how Australia is attempting to manage its ageing workforce. She reports on her presentation, and some US and English experiences from her Churchill Fellowship study.

Older workers are at a cross-road. In Australia, the US and England many older workers are ill-equipped for the new conditions in today's labour market, both in looking for work and in adapting to the new conditions that they face at work. They have lost their jobs due to economic and company restructuring: when a company wants to downsize or merge, it is often easiest for them to target the older workers.

The American Association of Retired Persons reports discrimination - as COTA finds in Australia - against mature age workers. These employment changes come at a time when the lives and future expectations of people in midlife, around 50-65 are changing at a very rapid rate, including:

• improved health and life expectancy from previous generations
  
  
• higher divorce rates
  
  
• later life family formation
  
  
• changed expectations around retirement.

My overseas trip has looked at:

• how older workers need to adapt to these new conditions and their own changing lives

• what non-government organizations should be doing to assist them

• what government supports need to be in place to assist them

• what employers should be doing in terms of basic human resource practices for their ageing workforces.

Older workers issues have emerged as a high priority public policy issue. This is due to population ageing and the forecasted dramatic reduction in new entrants to the labour market.

At the present time we have around 175,000 new entrants to the labour market each year. For the entire decade of 2020 to 2030 we will have a mere 125,000 new entrants.

Australia is only just coming to grips with these issues with the recent development of a mature age employment strategy by the national government, and an emerging but still very slow employer interest in the issues.

One way the Australian Government has addressed these themes has been by contracting COTA to conduct a project into what mature age people say they need in terms of the changed labour market.

England's Employers Forum on Age is making great strides in working with employers and human resource managers in obtaining age diversity in the workplace.

Australian employers are starting to understand the issues but Australia is somewhat behind other countries in this area – possibly because skill shortages have not quite caught up yet.

In both England and the United States age discrimination is a pervasive problem.

In Australia, labour market assistance is only available to people on social welfare payments. Many mature age people are falling into long term unemployment due to lack of assistance because they do not receive social welfare payments. They then deplete retirement savings and are more likely to have long term reliance on income support payments

Our social welfare system is still strongly linked to models of social protection that were relevant in the post-war era but are increasingly irrelevant in the new social, economic and labour market environment of the 21^st century.

We need to think through new ways of assisting people through mid life transitions including:

• planning for a long period of healthy and vigorous later life
• planning for a new and different concept of "retirement" than applied in the past.
• taking account of the possibilities of a wide range of transitions in mid-life that could include job loss or divorce, or new family formation.

In the UK a Pre-Retirement Association specializes in mid-life and mid-career planning and change and its work is most impressive.

Interest in Australia

There is a lot of interest in the US and England in COTA's project as people in the 50-65 age group there are facing many of the same issues as in Australia.

There is also strong interest in an academic research project in which COTA is involved:

Negotiating Transitions to Retirement. It is part of a larger project with a very large number of players entitled Towards a New Social Settlement.

The project is based on the idea that our social support systems were established in the post war period based on a model of a social contract and economic relationships which have largely vanished for many people, especially those between the ages of 50 and 65.

It aims to document the new and emerging issues for people in that age group and develop a policy framework of social assistance which will provide better protections in terms of the new kinds of risk that many people face such as retrenchment, divorce, responsibilities for children or grandchildren.

The commonality of the themes of this project with issues faced by people 50-65 in other countries has suggested that this is a project of potential international significance. Many organisations in England and the USA wish to be involved.

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