Baby boomers are right in the firing line.
It’s like the 1960s all over again, except this time older men as well as women are facing workplace discrimination.
It’s hard to believe now, but in the 1960s women had to resign from the Australian Public Service once they got married. Back then, the price of marriage was forced retirement for most Australian women. The Public Service only abolished this rule in 1966.
The prevailing view was that a married woman’s place was solely in the home. Not only that, if she did work she was robbing married men and young single people of a job.
Today, we have another form of forced retirement – for older Australians.
Dramatic medical and health care advances have meant that someone aged 60 today is likely to be in much better health and have a considerably longer life expectancy than someone of the same age in the 1960s. Most work these days involves using the brain rather than manual labor, so in theory there is nothing to stop a healthy, capable and willing 70 year old from working.
Phil Ruthven, founder and chairman of IBISWorld, leads a busy business life. Well past 65, he says that the only way to wear the brain out is to stop using it. He predicts that ‘retiring closer to 80 years of age in 2100 will probably be the norm. Already, 65 is too young for more and more people.’
Yet while about 25% of the population is older, currently they comprise only 16% of Australia’s workforce. This represents an enormous loss to the community, both in human and economic terms. Deloitte research, for example, indicates that increasing the older workforce by 5% would add an extra $48 billion annually to Australia’s GDP.
Willing to Work Inquiry
It is timely that on 15 April, Susan Ryan, Age and Disability Commissioner, launched the Willing to Work Inquiry, that will look at employment discrimination against older people and people with disability.
Among other things, the inquiry will seek to identify the barriers that prevent people from working, and in consultation with employers, affected individuals and other stakeholders, establish strategies to overcome these barriers.
I have to say I am not comfortable with the banding together of older people and people with disability. I don’t think it does justice to either group to link them together as if there is some direct relationship. Would we have an Inquiry into youth employment discrimination and people with a disability?
Leaving that aside, such a study is well overdue. We simply can’t afford to exclude large numbers of people who want to work and are capable of doing so.
Susan Ryan says ‘we’ve had this demographic revolution – we’re living a generation longer than our forebears did and yet the workplace environment hasn’t changed.’
The Australian Bureau of Statistics indicates that of Australians aged 65-69 years, 64% of women and 43% of men had no superannuation coverage and these proportions increased to 87% of women and 69% of men in the 70 years and over age group.
Clearly, many Australians will face financial hardship in retirement. Approximately 2.3 million people receive either a full or part age pension. As things stand, those numbers will grow substantially in coming years. It is unlikely that Australians will be happy to pay higher taxes to meet the cost of this. We need to find ways of enabling people to continue in paid employment – either full or part time – so they can build their superannuation and other savings and delay any potential reliance on the age pension.
We need another revolution
We need a revolution in our attitudes and employment practices along the lines of the 1960s and 1970s that saw unprecedented numbers of women entering and staying in the workforce.
Can we imagine going back to 1960s employment practices that excluded married women? Of course not.
In decades to come, we will look back and wonder how we could have deliberately excluded so many willing, experienced, and knowledgeable people from the workforce. In the meantime, people aged 55 and above will have to fight hard to have their individual and collective worth recognised and valued. This is especially the case for women.
What’s your experience as a 55+ worker or as an employer of older workers?