Have you been excluded from working because of age?

The pressure cooker is on, and the Government is sure it wants people to work longer and later in life.  The way they are going to encourage this is looking like becoming apparent in the upcoming budget, or as a result of the commission of audit. Rumours are that they will raise the pension age, probably for the next generation of Boomers coming through.  But will they attack the real issue… the problem of workplace exclusion that is the truth behind older unemployment?

If workplace attitudes stay the way they are today, the fact is, raising the pension age will just shift the problem around.  People over 65 will go from being on the pension and unemployed to the unemployment line, and benefits.   It wont create any material benefit to Government or taxpayers.

Age Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Ryan, has yesterday called on the federal Government to give the highest priority to addressing the needs of older people who are capable and wish to keep working up to and past the current pension age

“The simple fact is that raising the pension age will not work if you don’t first ensure that people can continue to keep working if they wish or need to, and are capable of doing so,” Commission Ryan said. “You will simply be shifting people from the pension to the unemployment benefit and there would be no savings to the budget”.

“We urgently need to address the structural, attitudinal and social problems that make businesses believe they should not employ older people or retain them in their workforce – we need to address age discrimination.”

Commissioner Ryan agreed that there was a significant budget problem related to our ageing population, but pointed out that it is partially caused by exclusion of older people from the workforce. It was this exclusion that should be addressed immediately.

Commissioner Ryan agreed that there was a significant budget problem related to our ageing population, but pointed out that it is partially caused by exclusion of older people from the workforce. It was this exclusion that should be addressed immediately.

“As a long term strategy, it is reasonable, given the predicted expansion of the proportion of the Australian community who will be of age pension age, that we look at increasing the eligibility age for receiving it.”

“The immediate crisis we face is one of older people being forced out of the workforce when they are, in a great many cases, still able to make high level effective contributions to business,” Commissioner Ryan said. “In an era when we are always hearing about the reduced available workforce in our country, it irrational that older people continue to be one of the great overlooked and ignored solutions.”

image: SBS TV