with a quarter of the time in a crouched position. It is hardly surprising that those women suffered from high rates of back pain and other problems and were often absent from work.
‘Work is usually a healthier occupation for a 60-year-old white solicitor, for example,’ says the report, ‘who has a high degree of control over her working life and can buy domestic help if she needs it, than it is for a 60-year-old African Caribbean office cleaner, with little job security and a heavy domestic burden.’
Even our own community nurses, coming up for retirement at 55 with relatively generous pension settlements, show little sign of being lured back to work, even when they are told that they will be able to keep their full pension and earn on top, so desperate is the need for their skills and experience. So, despite all the evidence of older women gaining benefits from continuing to work, it is clear that for some women the thought of carrying on – perhaps because they are burnt out by what they have been doing, because they do not trust management, or because they have seen too many upheavals in organizational terms in recent years – just doesn’t appeal very much.
So there is a paradox here, at least. Most research agrees that staying in work for women provides them with better social networks and keeps them healthy. Yet whether they actually want to work depends on a range of other factors, like flexibility, stress, respect, conditions and safety: the rate of slip, trip and fall injuries rises significantly with age for women, but not apparently for men. So we have to do more to prevent accidents, more to appreciate those women and what they do, and perhaps more too in those health professions where they are in short supply to give them control over their own work.
Age discrimination
The real question, behind all of these questions, is more fundamental. Why has government in the UK, and governments more generally, not made it easier to carry on working? Why have they only woken up to the need because they are frightened of the demographic time bomb? And why is there such a culture of retirement at 60 or 65, which clearly does not suit many people – especially when research shows that, if all the older people who wanted to work actually found jobs, they would generate economic output as high as £30 billion?
There are excellent economic reasons like this why society needs to make it easier to carry on working, but the real reason our governments have been so slow is probably the same reason employers have been so slow. They discount the skills and experience of older people, and cling to an increasing faith in those of the young.
‘If the offices of the FTSE100’s chief executives had a theme tune, it would be the refrain of Bob Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’: ‘Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,’ wrote The Times’ then business editor James Harding, in 2007.13 The average age of FTSE 100 chief executives had fallen by nine months to 52 over the preceding five years and, at the beginning of 2007, there were more top British chief executives in their 30s than in their 60s.
Strangely enough, Europe is going against the trend in the USA and Asia in this respect, where average ages are rising. It is almost as if, as power is passed to an ever younger age group, they feel that much more uncomfortable about the voice of experience. ‘Corporate Britain is squandering experience, driving out good people … when they are in their prime,’ wrote Harding. ‘There is too much age concern in the executive suite.’
There is such double-think about all this, when 90 per cent of us think old people should be cherished and 60 per cent think the elderly enrich our cultural life. ‘Oh really?’ said the columnist Janet Street-Porter. ‘If that is the case, how come we don’t take the time and trouble to know any of these national treasures? Half those under 24 who were surveyed didn’t know anyone over 70, and vice versa. If old people are so supersonic, how come the country is full of homes where ageing relatives have been parked out of sight?’14
Of all those organizations most active in their age discrimination, the most obvious are the broadcasters. The BBC ran into trouble for dropping Nick Ross from his own Crimewatch programme, which he started presenting in 1984, at the age of 59. They had already had negative comment about dropping the newsreader, Moira Stuart, on the basis she looked too old. Joan Bakewell was dropped from a TV show called Rant on Channel 5 because she was not within ‘their audience demographic’. Too old, it seems. Why is it that broadcasters are so dismally knee-jerk in their pursuit of younger viewers and listeners, forgetting that Terry Wogan still pulls in a huge audience at well over sixty, and that the oldies’ market is growing, not shrinking?
Those who depend on broadcast coverage are especially vulnerable as Sir Menzies Campbell discovered in 2007. But those who need no broadcast coverage are still heaved out of their jobs at 65. With new age discrimination legislation in place, is it legal – let alone morally acceptable, which it plainly is not – to discriminate against older workers on the basis that the right to claim compensation for unfair dismissal and statutory redundancy pay stops at 65?
If the FTSE 100 companies are not setting an example, who will? But those at the opposite end of the debate are not setting an example either. A huge number of public sector workers believe they have the right – or at least they exercise this opportunity – to take early retirement at 55. Many people are forced to retire early, admittedly on pretty well near a full pension, because of reorganization after reorganization, especially in the NHS. But the idea that we can leave a job and get a full pension at 55 as a teacher, a community nurse, a hospital nurse, when society is crying out for more people with real experience to do these jobs, is absurd. Yet any attempt government makes to convince public sector workers to stay longer, to forego their very generous pension rights – which were once seen as a compensation for not earning so well when working, which is less true now – has been met with a truculent refusal to negotiate.
There must be a better way forward, given the evidence that many older people find life more satisfying if they are still working. The 55-year-old teachers, social workers and nurses might be persuaded to work to 60 or 65, or longer if possible, if they could get a six-month sabbatical on full pay at 55. Sabbaticals are good for people, whereas retirement seems less beneficial than people used to think. They could learn something new, travel, see people doing their kind of work somewhere where they do it quite differently, and then come back and work at least another three to five years. It would save the public purse considerably in terms of training new people who would also expect to retire at 55. It would keep very experienced people in the workforce. But for those who feel burned out by the constant changes, or just worn out with dealing with difficult, inattentive children in the classroom, it would refresh them and excite them.
Surely before we accept the public sector’s refusal to work longer, despite the obvious need, as well as the benefits to the workers involved, we should try more of a carrot approach. Indeed, those older people who go on grown-up ‘gap years’ are obviously fulfilled by it, learn a lot, and have much to teach the rest of us, if only we would let them.
There is a proposal that older drivers should be given cognitive tests every five years to retain their driving licence, because studies have indicated that older drivers are more likely to be involved in accidents. At the moment motorists aged 70 or more have to report any medical condition which may affect their ability to drive. When this was first reported, the Times had an online debate, and some of the responses make appalling reading. ‘The elderly are dangerous enough as pedestrians without letting them drive cars!’ wrote Simon Moss of Kiev in the Ukraine. ‘The cognitive tests … look pretty ridiculous too. A five year old or a drunk could easily pass them. Wouldn’t an eye text be more relevant? Or a test of reaction times? Or would that be more politically incorrect?’15 Yet all the evidence suggests younger drivers cause far more accidents
