“Too old, too senior, too experienced, too expensive – heard ’em all. Ours is a society which does not value age and lived experience. Over 50? It’s the scrap heap for you.”
I can’t remember where I saw that quote, but I bet you’ve heard those sentiments many times. The media are always bringing us stories about people who, having lost their job in late middle age, find it very hard – even impossible - to get another one.
It’s understandable that people experiencing such treatment get pretty bitter about it. And it’s not surprising the media and the politicians take their complaints so seriously. The federal government has appointed successive age discrimination commissioners, and instigated various schemes offering subsidies to employers willing to hire older workers.
All of which is just as likely to increase prejudice as reduce it. The more public figures bang on about the prevalence of age discrimination, the more they risk sending a message to employers that if everyone else is ridding themselves of older workers, why aren’t they?
And if older workers weren’t sub-standard, why would the government find it necessary to subsidise their cost?
It would be silly to deny that some employers are prejudiced against older workers – just as some are prejudiced against young workers (an injustice the media are far less eager to tell us about).
But it’s just as silly to leap from the truth that some proportion of older workers has trouble finding re-employment to the outlandish claim that every worker over 50 is headed for the scrap heap.
I don’t know the true extent of discrimination against older workers, but I’m pretty sure we’ve been given an exaggerated impression of it, with many older workers caused to worry unnecessarily.
If there was any truth to the notion that everyone over 50 is headed for the scrap heap, we should be seeing a sharp decline in the rate at which people over 50 are participating in the labour force.
But we’re not. Indeed, the reverse is happening. The statistical truth is that the participation rates of older age groups are higher than they’ve ever been – a point Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe made in a little-noticed speech last year.
The ageing of the population – and, more particularly, the retirement of the baby-boomer bulge – means the proportion of older people working should have declined. Remarkably, it’s increased.
There was a time when early retirement was all the rage. As soon as you could retire, you did. And a lot of workers were retired involuntarily.
But those days are long gone. The age at which men and women are retiring keeps rising. In the 1980s and ‘90s, less than one worker in 10 was over 55. Today it’s almost one in five.
Since 2000, the “participation rate” for men aged 55 to 64 has risen from 60 per cent to about 67 per cent. The rate for women has been rising since the early ‘80s – from 20 per cent to 60 per cent.
For men aged 65 and over, the participation rate has risen since 2000 from 10 per cent to almost 20 per cent. (Read that again if it didn’t sink in.) For women in the same age group, participation has gone from a per cent or two to about 10 per cent.
The big news is that older people are staying longer in the workforce than ever before, but the story we’re being fed is that employers are discriminating against older workers wherever you look.
How has this remarkably under-reported truth come about? Partly for negative reasons. The higher cost of homes has caused people to take on mortgages later in life, meaning some people have higher levels of mortgage debt as they approach retirement and don’t want to stop working until it’s paid off.
The knowledge that we’re living longer – combined with the super industry’s unceasing efforts to convince us we haven’t saved enough – has prompted some people to delay their retirement.
Governments have lifted the age pension age to 65 for women, and are now phasing the age for both sexes up to 67. They’ve also raised the age at which you may access your superannuation savings.
But then there are the positive reasons. The present generation of older workers is much healthier than earlier generations.
And we’re living longer. Which makes it hardly surprising we’re working longer. Of course, another factor that’s helping is greater acceptance by employers of “flexible work practices” – including allowing workers to shift from full-time to part-time. That is, there’s been a rise in semi-retirement.
Then there’s the fact that more and more people work in the services sector, in jobs that tend to be less physically demanding.
But perhaps the biggest factor is the delayed effect of the trend for most mothers to return to the workforce after childrearing. Now more of them are still working decades later.
Oldies are always expounding on the supposed shortcomings of the younger generation. But there’s one respect in which oldies set youngsters a bad example: they’re champions at feeling sorry for themselves – even when the facts don’t back them up.
