how to do it using Macromedia Flash, she sent a Christmas card to various friends in 2000, and went to Australia. When she got back, there were some 1,600 messages from people all over the world who had seen it and wanted her to set up a website. She did, but it crashed under the strain of huge demand. So friends and relatives helped her set up her business, investing in higher-grade technology, and she became an instant success. Not everyone does so well, but Jacquie Lawson is a shining example of someone who wanted to keep going as she got older, and had some good ideas.
There are also moves to keep people employed beyond retirement age. Older employees are being encouraged to stay at work longer to prevent a ‘dependency crisis’. That applies to both women and men, but women are more concentrated in poorer-paid and part-time jobs, so their financial provision for old age tends to be worse than men’s – and they tend to live longer too. As a result, we are seeing women in the workforce to an increasing extent, especially amongst older age groups.
There are 1.5 million women in the workforce between the ages of 45 and 64, and some 113,000 over 65, when women’s ‘official’ retirement age is still 60. For many of these women, the effects of working are wholly beneficial: more money, better mental health, better self-esteem and better social networks. A large body of evidence suggests that many women of all ages get much of their social support from colleagues at work, and this must be particularly true for women who have been widowed or whose children have moved away.
Official efforts
Despite a new official desire to keep people at work longer, and a plethora of initiatives to make sure that this happens, there are huge challenges in finding and keeping a job in later life, especially in areas of high unemployment, in the toughest regions or the toughest sectors. There is also real age discrimination. This is partly because of obsolete social protection schemes which means that older people get their earnings stopped to pay for their social support.
There is still a prevailing view that older workers are too costly and resistant to change. The Social Exclusion Unit of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister reported in 2004 that the low level of older workers in jobs costs the economy between £19 and £31 billion a year in lost output and taxes, and increased welfare payments, not to mention all those skills lost to employers.9 Yet nine out of ten older people believe that employers discriminate against them, and a quarter speak from experience. As many as ten per cent of companies refuse to employ anyone over 50.
The European Union is now resolved to do something about this, given the waste of resource so many older people not working represents. The idea of anonymous CVs certainly helps people from ethnic minorities, another group who are unfairly discriminated against in employment, but they are very little help to older workers, because a glance at the work history gives away the rough age of the applicant.
Some EU member states have tried to create incentives for employers to hire specific age groups by making them more attractive – that is to say, less protected – than the rest of the workforce. But this approach has not really helped either, though those countries which have a rather different approach, and a range of positive active ageing policies, are succeeding in attracting older workers. It works where working conditions are improved for everybody, with early retirement schemes being restricted to cases where major restructuring is inevitable, and where allowing part-time work to be combined with part-time pensions is the norm, so that people are not caught in a social benefit trap where it simply is not worth their while to work.
The European Union is worried about their ageing populations and falling birth rates. Japan is facing similar issues, and tackling them by paying grants to employers of older people and by other means of supporting older workers directly. The Japan Organization for Employment of the Elderly and Persons with Disabilities (JEED) does a huge amount of work trying to get older people into work, and they also work to police the new law which forces employers to take measures to keep people in work until at least 65.
JEED provides counselling and advice services on employing older people, and the measures – half of the costs of which are paid for by the government – include health management counselling, specialist advice services for re-employment, and much else besides. This is so far in advance of anything done in Europe that it seems amazing to us, and yet these are exactly the kinds of measures we need to see if older people are to be comfortable at work and not treated as slightly eccentric for continuing to want to be there. They are also working away at a long-term ‘Project to Develop a Solid Foundation for a Society Where People Can Work Regardless of Their Age (The Age-free Project)’, to find out what kind of systems would be needed so that anybody can work regardless of age.
But beyond the subsidies to companies that are making efforts in this direction, there is support for self-employment too. If three or more older people (aged 45 plus) have united to start an enterprise, and are themselves employing workers, they can get grants to pay their start-up 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
