New research proves ageism laws don’t protect older workers

Last week TAEN published the latest edition of its 50+ Jobseekers Survey. In some ways the results are predictable – surveys so often tell us things that we already know by instinct – but there are surprising insights too.

ONS figures show more older people in work and there is a general feeling that older people are doing reasonably well in the labour market.

The sad fact is however, that deeply embedded structural disadvantages and ingrained ageist attitudes bar hundreds of thousands of older people from returning to work. It is clear that older jobseekers struggle harder than most. Overwhelmingly they want to work because of financial need, a desire to feel valued and the social interaction work brings. Many are ‘worried’ or ‘desperate’ about not working.

They identify adverse attitudes by recruiters, mismatches of their own skills or qualifications with employers’ needs and the national focus on youth unemployment as being among the reasons for their problems.

These barriers faced by older jobseekers continue more than six years after age discrimination was outlawed by the 2006 Age Regulations and two years after the end of the Default Retirement Age (DRA), allowing people to be forcibly retired at 65.

Today, despite these reforming legal changes, the challenge of ending age discrimination is as relevant as ever. Only one in ten over 50s looking for work think age discrimination law had helped them.

47 per cent of our older jobseekers believed that the law had not had any benefit at all. One respondent, a former managing director seeking work, commented, “Age discrimination is rife in my view. Employers can work out your age with ease.”

Some respondents even volunteered the view that repeal of the DRA had made it harder to get work!

A former HR manager commented, “Given that compulsory retirement is now not available I suspect that many employers are reluctant to recruit older staff who, they fear, may present motivational and even attendance issues in future.”

One could argue that finding work has always been bad for older jobseekers. Blaming the end of the DRA on their current problems may be misreading the problem.

Moreover, those completing our survey as “older jobseekers” were by definition people who had not (so far) succeeded in getting work. Others who had been successful might have offered different views – if we had asked them.

Nonetheless, how do we respond to our respondents who claimed their problems could be explained by employers being charier about hiring people who want to work longer, now the DRA has been removed?

Perhaps they are right.

We have a labour market that is ambivalent in its attitudes to older people. Employers will allow them to work longer in the same jobs if they wish but they bottle out of offering them new jobs, believing they may want to work for ever.People are working longer in part because they can choose to remain in work longer but the lot of the older person who has left a job is problematic.

He or she is likely to fall outside the person specification offered by employers to recruitment agencies, simply on grounds of age. And there is significant evidence (anecdotal, of course) that some recruitment agencies connive with employers and fail to challenge ageist attitudes. (See Loughborough University’s Working Late project for example).

It seems clear that the law is being flouted with impunity and there is a presumption that, ‘of course employers will discriminate by age if they wish to so’. The eradication of age discrimination in employment is a far from complete.

The time has surely come to assess the effectiveness of the law against age discrimination in recruitment. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has the power to launch official enquiries and undertake formal investigations. What is stopping it?

http://taen.org.uk/blog/view/119