Employers have been encouraged to consider older job candidates, after an 89-year-old man in the UK who claimed he was “dying from boredom” successfully found a job.

The Guardian reports Joe Bartley, an elderly resident of Devon, England, posted a job advert in the local newspaper last month seeking 20 hours of work a week.

“Senior citizen 89 seeks employment in Paignton area. 20hrs+ per week. Still able to clean, light gardening, DIY and anything. I have references. Old soldier, airborne forces. Save me from dying of boredom!” Bartley wrote.

Read more: One in four older Australians experience age discrimination at work: Study

Just two days after The Guardian’s article, Bartley received two offers of part-time work and has accepted a hospitality role with a local family-run café.

The café’s owner Sarah Martin told the Guardian, “no matter what your age or your background, you deserve a chance”.

“A lot of people who come here don’t just come for coffee, they come for a chat, so Joe is perfect,” Martin told The Guardian.

“How often do you get an 89-year-old person approaching you and saying he wants to work? Usually, we have to go out and find people, and when we get them, sometimes they don’t even want to work.”

Bartley also received a job offer from a bakery in a nearby town, but reportedly turned it down, as he could not easily travel to the business.

Psychologist Eve Ash believes businesses everywhere should consider hiring older workers, saying many of them a “defying expectations”.

“We typically don’t associate working with older people, we typically associate them with sitting around and taking it easy,” Ash says.

“We need to see fewer age judgements. There’s a perception once you hit 70, it’s time on from then on.”

“A whole new workforce”

Ash believes a whole new workforce exists in people over the age of 70, with older workers having “a different type of determination and stamina”. Ash’s own father still works as a land surveyor at the age of 92, with no plans to retire until he hits 100.

Some concessions do need to be made when considering older workers, Ash says, as “40 hour, nine to five jobs” are generally not suitable.

“At any age over 70 there are certain things need to be tested, like driving skills. Older workers are also more suited to shorter weeks and irregular working hours,” Ash says.

“There’s a wide range of things older people could be doing, like customer service or minding things.”

“We need to remove these concepts of age [limiting] employability potential.”

Ash says more evidence is needed to see exactly what sort of jobs are suitable for older workers, but firmly believes they are more likely to “have the time and the care to do things”.

“We might discover they have amazing positive mood characteristics, and in the workplace, this is extremely important,” she says.

It was not reported how many hours Bartley would be working at the café, but on Sundays, he will catch a lift with his boss to work, while catching the bus the rest of the time.

“We think about these things all the time. We are never going to be rich, but we like to give something back, so when we saw the advert there was no question – the minute we saw it we knew we’d give him a job,” Martin told The Guardian.

Source: Startupsmart

David Penberthy

October 1, 2016

A MATE of mine who rightly describes himself as a grumpy old man told me a  great grumpy old man joke the other day. It involved a man in his late 50s, recently retrenched, who had typed up a CV for the first time in decades and was being interviewed by a 20-something HR woman at a job placement firm about his qualities as an employee.
“Do you think that you have any weaknesses?” she asked, routinely.
“Probably honesty,” he said.
“I don’t think honesty is a weakness,” she said.
“I don’t give a f–k what you think,” he replied.
Many a true word is said in jest. I like this joke because it goes to the heart of the perception that older workers — or in this bloke’s case, non-workers — are irascible and stuck in their ways. Also, older workers are seen as providing limited return on investment, to use that cliched management term.
Why bother hiring a crotchety know-it-all who might give you a decade of productivity, when you could stump for a bright young thing to shape in your image, and hopefully hold on to for years?
Our economy is at a crossroads, shifting from its reliance on manu-facturing and mining to the new service and data-driven industries.
There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian, our Prime Minister says.
For many people, most of them men aged in their 50s and early 60s, there has never been a more unnerving time to be an Australian — because so many people being squeezed out of jobs are older men.

‘So much of the discussion around unemployment has focused on the young.’

Men who, if sacked, will never work again. The figures are borne out by the depressing statistic that anyone who is retrenched over the age of 55 will spend at least twice as long on the dole as a person under that age. And a 2014 study by the National Seniors Productive Ageing Centre revealed that 96 per cent of people aged 55 to 59 who were retrenched wound up retiring, even though many were desperate to work again.
So much of the discussion around unemployment has focused on the young. There have been calls to raise the Newstart allowance from $264 a week to $317, a $53-a-week increase that would cost the Budget $7.7 billion.
It’s been pushed by the Australian Council of Social Service and the Australian Industry Group fearing the current rate is so low that people cannot present themselves properly or travel to look for jobs. I have no way of knowing whether the public agrees with the ACOSS and AIG position. My hunch is that many would be suspicious of the proposed rise, fearing that young people who could be rightly described as bludgers would treat it as their personal payday.
The public view would be different, however, if you asked people to compare the indolent 20-somethings who had never looked for work in his life, and the middle-aged man who had done nothing but work, and who found out last Monday his company was shifting operations to Beijing or Bangalore.
The Federal Government’s logic in denying calls for a Newstart increase is that it risks turning the welfare safety net into a hammock. I agree with that view for younger workers with no dependants, and no interest in working. I am not sure if it is fair for older people who have mortgages, debts, children — and a burning desire to work again.

The Federal Government’s logic in denying calls for a Newstart increase is that it risks turning the welfare safety net into a hammock.
I am not suggesting that every unemployed young person doesn’t want to work. There are some suburbs in Australia where the old blue-collar jobs have gone forever.
But there are plenty of younger people who would not work in an iron lung. Surely the best way to get them off their behinds is with less carrot, and more stick.
One of the more illuminating moments of my journalistic career came about 10 years ago when I was asked to go from editing newspapers to running a news website. You could not have found a team more adept to the digital age, be it writing HTML code, or generating new audiences via social media channels.
Their only weakness, as purported journalists, was that many of them didn’t know what The Dismissal was, how Harold Holt disappeared, or who the hell Harold Holt even was. We had replaced people who were walking encyclopedias with the Wikipedia generation. As a community, we do that every time we sort through the CVs on the basis of age, not to forget perceived grumpiness.

Source: Sun Herald

Date
May 14, 2016

Viktoria Rother made a terrible miscalculation. When she took voluntary redundancy aged 45, the former customs officer felt certain that as an educated, single, child-free professional she would soon find full-time work.

But her lack of luck in the job market left her in despair. Finally a recruiter laid out the brutal truth. “She informed me frankly that most employers weren’t interested in people my age or older; they preferred to employ those under 40.”

“I lost hope of ever finding paid work again,” Ms Rother said.

Age and disability discrimination commissioner Susan Ryan.
Age and disability discrimination commissioner Susan Ryan. Photo: Rohan Thompson
After hearing countless stories like this, Age and Disability Discrimination Commissioner Susan Ryan is “enraged at the unfairness” that perfectly capable people in their 50s or younger are constantly being told they are “a bit long in the tooth for this job”.

​”It is unthinkable that people who lose their jobs in their 50s may live up to another 40 years without paid employment,” said Ms Ryan.

Ongoing, systemic age and disability workforce discrimination is not only a massive drain on the economy but has devastating consequences for individuals, a national inquiry led by Ms Ryan has concluded.

Raden Dunbar got a taste of the age discrimination he’d dished out to others when he was hiring in the past.
Raden Dunbar got a taste of the age discrimination he’d dished out to others when he was hiring in the past.
Roughly a quarter of the population are 55 and over but they make up only 16 per cent of the total workforce. Although 83.2 per cent of people without a disability participate in the workforce, only 53.4 per cent of people with a disability do.

Employment rates of people over 55 drop off sharply, to only 12.7 per cent for people over 65. But in the past decade, the number of people over 45 who say they won’t retire before 70 has risen dramatically, from 8 per cent to 23 per cent, the ABS reports. “They expect to, they want to, but will they find jobs?” Ms Ryan said.

Governments want people to work for longer to ease the looming pressure on the budget as the proportion of the population over 65 swells. It is feared the age pension and health systems, which older people will rely on for longer than ever as longevity increases, will become too expensive for the shrinking workforce to fund through taxes.

The inquiry found Australian labour force participation rates for older people and people with disability remain “far too low” and lag behind comparable OECD countries. Even with a 7 per cent increase in the mature age labour force participation rate we would lag behind New Zealand, but the boost to GDP in 2022 would be about 1.4 per cent, or $25 billion, says the Grattan Institute.

Every public service job in Australia should have flexible working conditions and targets for employing older workers and people with disabilities, the inquiry recommends. Private employers should have to publicly report progress on hiring older workers and those with disabilities, with the role of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to be expanded to monitor diversity. A national action plan should be developed and federal cabinet should include a minister for longevity, it recommends.

Attorney-General George Brandis said the report was a “very, very important body of work” and a “milestone in public policy making”. The recommendations would be considered, Senator Brandis said at the launch earlier this month.

The inquiry heard the same excuses for age and disability discrimination as were once commonly used to justify gender discrimination, “with no basis of evidence for the stereotype”, Ms Ryan said. These include that older people or people with disabilities are “unreliable, too distracted by family responsibilities, can’t handle high-stress jobs or won’t be able to work at a high enough pace”.

“I believe that we need the same sort of cultural change in relation to older people and people with disability as we had to push for and finally achieve in relation to women,” said Ms Ryan, who pioneered the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 as minister assisting the prime minister on the status of women in the Hawke Labor government.

“It is not a niche problem. It is a major demographic fact and we need to deal with it as much as we did with women, but we don’t want it to take as long.”

After he turned 64, educator and consultant Raden Dunbar got a taste of the age discrimination he’d dished out to others when he was hiring in the past, he told the inquiry. As a recruiter, “I instinctively avoided hiring applicants who were older and more experienced than me – because of a concern that such people might be ‘difficult to handle’.”

“I now think that, out of self-interest, I didn’t want my own standing to be jeopardised by the presence of a much older, more experienced subordinate.” Over-qualified, too senior, or over-experienced for the position were the usual excuses made to unsuccessful older applicants. “I could also pretend that they would ‘waste the training investment’ in view of their purportedly shorter future working lives,” Mr Dunbar said.

Programs and subsidies to encourage employers to hire older or disabled workers are ineffective, the inquiry found. The lack of opportunities to gain new skills for mid-life workers from declining industries like manufacturing condemns many capable and experienced workers to “years of poverty on benefits”.

Ms Ryan said older workers are also vulnerable to rip-offs under the rorting that has plagued the vocational education and training industry. “We need to make sure that … training is linked to a skill shortage in the area that they can realistically be trained to fill, not just some private provider who is enrolling them in something with a fancy name,” she said.

The report does not argue for special treatment for older workers or people with disabilities. The best person for the job should always get it, Ms Ryan said.

Viktoria Rother, now 53, is now adding to her stack of degrees with a master’s of environmental management and sustainability online through the University of Newcastle. Employers “think that those of us who are over 40, our brains are atrophied and we can’t possibly learn anything new. I find it insulting,” she says. But she feels optimistic about her chances in a growing field. It is a “completely different and new career path for me because I think the government wants me to work until I am 103”, she says.

Source: SMH

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/overqualified-overexperienced-report-reveals-systemic-age-discrimination-20160512-gotn0p.html#ixzz48lWoflMq
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

May 7, 2016
Paul Gilder Herald Sun

Events have combined to cast retiree nest eggs into the path of a financial tornado.
‘TOTO, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

With those words Dorothy Gale, the heroine of cinema classic The Wizard of Oz, bravely takes her first steps into a foreign land full of uncertainty and risk.

Retirees and those soon to leave the workforce must be feeling a little like Dorothy this week after a run of events that have combined to cast their nest eggs into the path of a financial tornado.

The big banks set the scene as Westpac on Monday and ANZ a day later unveiled first-half earnings slumps and in ANZ’s case, a dividend cut, citing tough trading conditions and sending a shiver up the spine of yield-seeking investors.

It was the Reserve Bank’s turn on Tuesday, stealing the spotlight from Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison’s Budget by cutting the cash rate to an all-time low of 1.75 per cent in the war against deflation — leaving term deposit holders feeling even more unloved.

Perhaps the biggest whammy was in the Budget itself, with news of yet another overhaul to superannuation in the name of fairness and long-term fiscal repair.

Among changes set to be introduced from July next year, the annual cap on concessional — or pre-tax — contributions will be wound back from $30,000 to $25,000 for under-50s and $35,000 for over-50s.

For those earning $250,000 to $300,000, the tax rate on concessional contributions has been doubled to 30 per cent.

And the total a person can transfer into their pension fund — which attracts less tax than a super accumulation fund — will be capped at $1.6 million. It is estimated that those amendments will put an additional $2.9 billion into the government’s coffers over the next four years.

Combined, the revelations are turning the walk down the yellow brick road to a prosperous retirement into an arduous slog.

Remember, this is the generation who have been told that to be comfortable in their golden years, a couple aged around 65 will need to have about $59,200 a year to spend, while a single will need $43,100.

According to the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia, a couple at 65 will need $640,000 to aspire to those annual sums, while a single will need $545,000.

Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show men aged 55-64 have amassed on average $320,000 and women $180,000, while a household — which takes in the impact of single-occupant houses — has $400,000 in savings.

At those rates, many will be struggling to maintain that “comfortable” lifestyle well before their 75th birthdays, even with the benefits of the Age Pension.

Chant West head of research Ian Fryer says the gap is partly down to the relative immaturity of the compulsory super system, which has only been mandatory since 1992.

“It took a number of years for employer contributions to get to 9.5 per cent, so a lot of people nearing retirement aren’t going to get to those retirement savings levels,” Mr Fryer says.

While few are quibbling over the clamps intentionally being applied to the wealthy, economists are worried that more tinkering with super will further knock confidence in the system.

“The changes … still leave superannuation as highly tax preferred compared to alternatives,” AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver says.

“The concern though is that it will adversely affect the supply of patient long-term saving available to help grow the Australian economy.”

Respondents to the Westpac-Melbourne Institute’s consumer poll on the “wisest place for savings” has superannuation trailing the pack, favoured by less than 5 per cent.

Most favoured bank deposits, or paying down debt, while property was preferred by about one in five and shares about one in 10.

But the biggest long-term impact to wealth accumulation could yet come from interest rates.

The RBA also finds itself in a scary new world after official figures revealed Australia had joined the ranks of developed nations to suffer a bout of price deflation.

Announcing the RBA had taken the knife to the official interest rate this week, governor Glenn Stevens reasoned that “unexpectedly low” inflation — headline inflation was minus 0.5 per cent in the three months to March — was not to be dismissed lightly.

The hope is that in cutting rates, consumers will divert their mortgage savings back into the economy, and that extra demand will spur businesses to lift prices and reignite inflation.

But there is collateral damage, particularly for the reliable over-50s saver.

On hearing news of the rate cut, former Victorian premier and beyondblue founder Jeff Kennett labelled it a “disaster” for retirees.

“Low interest rates might be great news for homebuyers but for fixed income, more experienced Australians (who are) retired it is a disaster,” he tweeted.

Figures from RateCity.com.au, an online financial product broker, show the best term deposits on the market are offering about 3.3 per cent for one year, or about $6600 on a $200,000 deposit.

The big four banks are even stingier: rates of 2.3 per cent to 3.1 per cent are typical for anything up to five years.

“A lot of people are asking us where to park their savings when rates are low,” says RateCity money editor Sally Tindall.

“Online savings accounts are not offering a lot more than inflation, so the answer is often putting your money into a mortgage, which can be more productive in the long run.”

Mr Fryer says low returns have forced many people to take on more risk at a time when they have little recourse to recoup any heavy losses. For many, that means investing in Australian shares, and the big banks this week proved how stressful that path can be.

Lower rates, Mr Fryer says, can provide a sugar hit to shares but can also be a signal of difficult economic times to come.

Another obvious area of investment is property, after the government this week made good on its vow to leave negative gearing alone.

But Mr Fryer says would-be investors need to tread with caution.

“I’d be concerned if people were making investment decisions based on the current cash rate. They need to see if they can cope with higher repayments down the track.”

It seems that like Dorothy, anyone wanting to don a pair of ruby slippers in retirement might just need to do a little more legwork.

paul.gilder@news.com.au
Source: News.com

A new report has found that older Australians and casual workers of all ages have a higher likelihood of being laid-off, and struggling to find new jobs.

The report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) also found that a significant group face a decline in job quality, often moving from permanent to casual jobs. One in three people earn less than what they used to.

Most of the laid-off workers have limited access to re-employment support and only a moderate number receive “early and more intensive employment services through structural adjustment programmes”.

The report released recommendations for the federal government to help vulnerable workers find good jobs quickly by:

• moving away from the current sectoral approach to special assistance programs in case of mass layoffs towards an approach covering all sectors of the economy, with the intensity of intervention varying according to the workers’ needs
• introducing pilot schemes in a few areas to test the delivery by job active providers of intensive employment services adapted to the needs of laid-off workers
• expanding the training component in programs for laid-off workers and making use of skills assessment and individual training counselling to target training more effectively
• strengthening employers’ responsibilities for workers they are laying off by instituting a longer notice period in case of mass layoff, and ensuring that notification to Centrelink is enforced so that authorities can respond more quickly
• considering the introduction of a mechanism to publicly support firms putting workers on short hours, for example through publicly-funded training places or temporary subsidies to prevent excessive dismissals during cyclical downturns.

The document also reported that 2.3 per cent of Australian workers with at least one year of employment are laid-off each year because of downsizing or closures.

However, it noted that due to Australia’s flexible labour market, 70 per cent of unemployed workers found a new job within a year, and 80 per cent within two years.

Source:  Pro Bono Australia