Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age. Julia Neuberger
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costs. All this is serious stuff, and worth close examination if the UK, and Europe more widely, are to be anywhere in the same league in employing older staff.
What kind of work?
Thanks to a recent ESRC Report, Older People’s Experience of Paid Employment: Participation and Quality of Life, by a team from Sheffield University, we know that ‘the highest levels of well-being in any category were among those who were employed when over retirement age’.10 But – and this is the most important finding – of all those who were employed, life satisfaction was highest among the part-timers, and lowest among those who were forced to carry on working because they needed the money. In other words, it is not just a question of whether one is employed, unemployed or retired, but whether one wants to be.
Whether people want to be employed depends on their finding work which suits them. So there really does need to be more room for part-time and flexible employment for older people, which many say is what they want. The 2003 Joseph Rowntree Foundation report The Role of Flexible Employment for Older Workers showed that the choice depends partly on who you are.11
Leaving work tends to be a positive choice for workers with other advantages – including those (especially men) who have been with their present employer for longer, and are therefore more likely to have accumulated savings and pension entitlements, and those who have paid off their mortgages. People with health problems are also inclined to leave work early, especially low-paid men. But ‘early retirement’ for them is more likely to mean they were unable to stay employed, rather than something they chose.
Self-employment offers the job quality most comparable to that enjoyed by permanent full-time employees. Temporary employment rates next in terms of job quality, although this is more the case for people on fixed-term contracts than for casual workers or agency temps. Part-time employment offers the poorest job quality among the three types of flexible employment, and yet it is extremely popular amongst many older people. Overall, women appear more successful than men in finding flexible jobs for positive reasons, but they often find that these jobs are poor quality, or extremely badly paid.
It is worse than that for many part-time older women workers, according to the report Older Women, Work and Health (Lesley Doyal and Sarah Payne).12 Some of the supposedly ‘light work’ offered to women often leads to musculoskeletal disorders as a result of repetitive strain injury from keyboards or simply from having to move heavy loads which no one had recognized as being necessary. Take French train cleaners, for example. Doyal and Payne found their labour force was mixed, but only the women were allocated to cleaning the toilets, which was work that was dirty, physically demanding and required considerable technical skill. It involved travelling over 20 kilometres a day and maintaining uncomfortable postures, with a quarter of the time in a crouched position. It is hardly surprising that those women suffered from high rates of back pain and other problems and were often absent from work.
‘Work is usually a healthier occupation for a 60-year-old white solicitor, for example,’ says the report, ‘who has a high degree of control over her working life and can buy domestic help if she needs it, than it is for a 60-year-old African Caribbean office cleaner, with little job security and a heavy domestic burden.’
Even our own community nurses, coming up for retirement at 55 with relatively generous pension settlements, show little sign of being lured back to work, even when they are told that they will be able to keep their full pension and earn on top, so desperate is the need for their skills and experience. So, despite all the evidence of older women gaining benefits from continuing to work, it is clear that for some women the thought of carrying on – perhaps because they are burnt out by what they have been doing, because they do not trust management, or because they have seen too many upheavals in organizational terms in recent years – just doesn’t appeal very much.
So there is a paradox here, at least. Most research agrees that staying in work for women provides them with better social networks and keeps them healthy. Yet whether they actually want to work depends on a range of other factors, like flexibility, stress, respect, conditions and safety: the rate of slip, trip and fall injuries rises significantly with age for women, but not apparently for men. So we have to do more to prevent accidents, more to appreciate those women and what they do, and perhaps more too in those health professions where they are in short supply to give them control over their own work.
Age discrimination
The real question, behind all of these questions, is more fundamental. Why has government in the UK, and governments more generally, not made it easier to carry on working? Why have they only woken up to the need because they are frightened of the demographic time bomb? And why is there such a culture of retirement at 60 or 65, which clearly does not suit many people – especially when research shows that, if all the older people who wanted to work actually found jobs, they would generate economic output as high as £30 billion?
There are excellent economic reasons like this why society needs to make it easier to carry on working, but the real reason our governments have been so slow is probably the same reason employers have been so slow. They discount the skills and experience of older people, and cling to an increasing faith in those of the young.
‘If the offices of the FTSE100’s chief executives had a theme tune, it would be the refrain of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’: ‘Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ wrote The Times’ then business editor James Harding, in 2007.13 The average age of FTSE 100 chief executives had fallen by nine months to 52 over the preceding five years and, at the beginning of 2007, there were more top British chief executives in their 30s than in their 60s.
Strangely enough, Europe is going against the trend in the USA and Asia in this respect, where average ages are rising. It is almost as if, as power is passed to an ever younger age group, they feel that much more uncomfortable about the voice of experience. ‘Corporate Britain is squandering experience, driving out good people … when they are in their prime,’ wrote Harding. ‘There is too much age concern in the executive suite.’
There is such double-think about all this, when 90 per cent of us think old people should be cherished and 60 per cent think the elderly enrich our cultural life. ‘Oh really?’ said the columnist Janet Street-Porter. ‘If that is the case, how come we don’t take the time and trouble to know any of these national treasures? Half those under 24 who were surveyed didn’t know anyone over 70, and vice versa. If old people are so supersonic, how come the country is full of homes where ageing relatives have been parked out of sight?’14
Of all those organizations most active in their age discrimination, the most obvious are the broadcasters. The BBC ran into trouble for dropping Nick Ross from his own Crimewatch programme, which he started presenting in 1984, at the age of 59. They had already had negative comment about dropping the newsreader, Moira Stuart, on the basis she looked too old. Joan Bakewell was dropped from a TV show called Rant on Channel 5 because she was not within ‘their audience demographic’. Too old, it seems. Why is it that broadcasters are so dismally knee-jerk in their pursuit of younger viewers and listeners, forgetting that Terry Wogan still pulls in a huge audience at well over sixty, and that the oldies’ market is growing, not shrinking?
Those who depend on broadcast coverage are especially vulnerable as Sir Menzies Campbell discovered in 2007. But those who need no broadcast coverage are still heaved out of their jobs at 65. With new age discrimination legislation in place, is it legal – let alone morally acceptable, which it plainly is not – to discriminate against older workers on the basis that the right to claim compensation for unfair dismissal and statutory redundancy pay stops at 65?
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