The govt is scrapping the default retirment age, meaning you can no longer dismiss staff at 65.
Although, with people on average living longer, and there is no reason why you couldn't work into your 70's if your healthy enough and wanted to, it does pose issues for employers. So when now do you decide when it's time for an employee to go?
Can see some complicated questions arising from this. Do you want elderly employees operating machinery, will H&S dictate an age when you can no longer do certain jobs? Can you have an 85 year old fork lift truck driver or lathe operator?
Maybe it's your aging web designer that no longer wants to embrace the new holographic website technology, insisting on using older techniques. Is this grounds for dismissal, or force a retirement?
Or do we just assume that people over 65 all work in Sainsburys pushing trollies as the news seems to suggest.
BBC News - Fixed retirement age to be axed
I think the problem lies in the assumptions and generalisations about what people will be capable of - mentally, physically, or in terms of their attitude - at any given point in their life. We're all hugely different, and I'm sure everyone here can recall meeting a sixty-year-old who looked eighty and a eighty-year-old who looked about fifty and had a sharper mind than we did... Taking as an example, the web designer. Let's assume that some evidence exists to demonstrate that in general, an older person is less likely to embrace changes in technology than a younger person. That does not mean that every older person is less likely to be able to deal with technical changes. It's quite possible that an older employee working in a rapidly-changing tech industry has been dealing with changes for the entire twenty years of his tech career and that this is an aspect of the field that he enjoys. He'll also have developed and demonstrated other 'soft' work qualities like experience, work ethic, company loyalty, proven trustworthiness, negotiating skills, customer rapport and so on that might not be so prevalent in a person who has only just entered the world of work. Then again, you might find that your older employee has spent the last three years insisting that (whatever new tech) "will never catch on" and is refusing to go on a training course to learn how to use the new corporate software. But that's not an age issue. That's a "being a twit" issue. Being a twit is not age-specific. So there needs to be a solid pension mechanism in place to catch those who don't age so well and by their sixties are no longer really able to work... by the same token we need to diminish the constructs that see hale and hearty people in their sixties being booted out of the workplace and onto a state pension when they are quite willing and able to continue earning their living. It's the one-size-fits-all assumptions that are the big problem. (As for the pushing-trollies-in-Sainsburys thing, I suspect this is to do with demographic. If you're the CEO of BP and you've kept your VirtuallyMary |
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