Ageism - alive and well and living in Australia

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd released the 2010 Intergenerational Report with dire warnings about Australia’s ageing population.

“As the percentage of the population in the workforce shrinks, we simply cannot afford to waste the potential of older Australians,” he said.

“Australia has a lower rate of mature-age workforce participation than the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand - there is considerable room for improvement.

“If we can remove obstacles for older Australians to work, not only do we improve their quality of life but also we strengthen the economy.

“The choice for older Australians to stay in or leave the workforce should be just that - a choice, not something forced on them by prejudice or bad policy.”

Fine words, but Australian employers - aren’t listening.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that older workers are more likely to be under-employed, settling for part-time or casual roles. An astonishing 48 per cent of those aged 45 to 54, and 45 per cent of those aged 55 and over had less work than they wanted over the previous year.

A despairing National Seniors Chief Executive, Michael O’Neill says in the latest edition of HR Monthly, that older workers are “simply not in the mindset” of human resources managers.

Prejudice against older workers is well entrenched. When the Minister for Ageing, Justine Elliot, appointed well-known actress and political activist Noeline Brown as Australia’s first Ambassador for Ageing in 2008, her brief was to promote positive ageing among the country’s seniors.

In fact a considerable amount of her work has involved battling the myths about older workers: that they are unproductive; that they suffer from more health problems than their younger counterparts; they are less flexible; less reliable; don’t fit in.

“Ageism is just about the last ‘ism’ in our society that remains to be broken down,” Brown says.

“Try to deny a person employment on the basis of race or gender and there are grounds for official complaint.

“But during my travels around Australia I have spoken to people who are out of work, doing less hours, or making do with jobs below their skill levels for no other reason than they have reached a certain age.”

A friend is a contractor and highly qualified business analyst, who has just passed her 60th birthday. She says that younger people on recruitment panels are often prejudiced against people significantly older than themselves. “This is a significant problem for anyone over 50 applying for jobs,” she says.

She is a smart, attractive woman, but says “I have walked into interviews when they have quite evidently been shocked to see me”.

“The government was the last refuge of older people in ICT,” she says. “Mature workers came to Canberra because they couldn’t compete, especially in the extreme youth culture of Melbourne.

“But the government works against itself, because it doesn’t understand the discrimination process. The Gershon ICT reforms, that decimated the contracting community in Canberra, coincided with increased numbers of older workers taking retirement packages and younger workers moving into senior roles where they are now responsible for making hiring decisions.

“There were many channels for mature workers in the government ICT industry. But once a younger person is appointed into a hiring position, that channel closes permanently. So the chance of employment for mature people in government is declining.

“In the private sector, my age was an issue 20 years ago,” she says. “But there were still opportunities in government. Now the government is starting to catch up! We need tougher laws against age discrimination; perhaps young people should not be allowed to do the hiring!”

She claims there are now moves in Canberra to increase the percentage of young people in IT, and these are coming from managers who are trying to squeeze out the 60 to 70-year-old group to “give the young people a chance”.

Another friend, in his early 50s, worked as a scribe on a government recruiting panel. When the panel members agreed that an applicant was too old, he carefully reminded them that age discrimination was against government policy. Almost immediately, he found that his contract had been cancelled.

Yet another acquaintance, a 50-year-old woman, skilled at using office software, tried to get a job in a large department store. She was told she hadn’t enough (recent) retail experience. “Mature women have difficulty using our high-tech cash registers,” she was told.

A project at the Australian Institute for Social Research at Adelaide University concluded that there was no doubt ageism is alive and well in Australia. In their report, Experience Works - the Mature Age Employment Challenge, commissioned by National Seniors Australia, researchers described it as a powerful force which persists as a major barrier to the participation of older workers in employment.

The Age Discrimination Act 2004 does provide mechanisms to challenge discrimination against older people, but researchers found that employees were mostly not aware of its existence while employers simply ignored it.

To give Rudd his due, he has announced a $43 million package aimed at retraining and reskilling older workers who have lost, or are in danger of losing their jobs. However, it all seems rather patronising to those for whom skill is not the issue.

And if incidents of age discrimination still exist in government, as just outlined, then what hope is there for private industry?

My 60-year-old friend suggests that it is time for Grey Power to assert itself.

“We could boycott restaurants where there are no mature workers,” she says. “Throughout history, mature women worked in the hospitality industry.  Yet now it’s difficult to find a restaurant with mature staff. The exclusion is so absolute that the hospitality industry lobbied the government to import workers claiming, unbelievably, a ‘skill shortage’.”

Rudd’s proposal for a Consultative Forum to foster attitudinal change sounds promising, but its agenda is vague and we have heard nothing since it was announced more than two months ago, presumably pushed aside by more pressing agendas as the election approaches. Tax incentives are no use unless the jobs are there.

And how do we protect those who lose substantial assets, including their homes, because of discrimination in their 40s. Where will they be in their 50s and 60s?

The government should be leading the way. Why, after all, is there so much unemployment when agencies such as Consumer Affairs, the Ombudsman, the Australian Tax Office and Centrelink apparently have difficulty coping with their workloads?

Research clearly demonstrates that older people are more motivated, more likely to complete tasks on time, take less sick days and have greater loyalty than their younger counterparts.

Ageism is the final barrier to be addressed in Australian society and it’s time for action instead of words.