Employers putting youth before age

By SELWYN PARKER

Baby-boomers in the workforce are finding their hold on the job market threatened.

If Australian and United States statistics can be translated to New Zealand, one in four men between the ages of 45 and 64 is no longer employed. And they don't have much chance of finding a job either.

Some were pushed into early retirement. Some saw the writing on the wall, took the redundancy and fled. And some left willingly to do something different.

But increasingly, middle-aged males have become the victims of the cult of youth that they helped promote as baby-boomers, shouldering aside older men who stood in their way.

Of course, the same will probably happen to today's 35-something males. In short, the career life of the male could be shortening.

This is the evidence of an Australian Bureau of Statistics publication, Australian Social Trends 2000, which reports: "In 1997, there were 2.9 million men aged 45 and over. Of these, 1.3 million (44 per cent) had retired from full-time work, nearly all of whom had left the labour force entirely."

It adds that in the modern workplace, men from 45 upwards who are the prime targets when jobs are on the line. "Retrenchment rates were lowest at ages 35 to 44. They were highest for persons aged 55 to 64."

Redundancy in late middle-age doesn't just threaten a man's self-esteem and finances; it can take his life. Dr Richard Smith, executive editor of the British Medical Journal says: "The evidence that unemployment kills, particularly in the middle age group, verges on the irrefutable."

For proof, Australian Social Trends 2000 says that among unemployed men aged 45 to 55, there is a 37 per cent "excess of mortality." That is, they die sooner than employed men of the same age.

Good qualifications don't seem to provide any armour against retrenchment, either. In general, middle-aged men with vocational qualifications were more likely to be shown the door before those who had not acquired any formal extra skills. The reasons are probably two-fold.

First, higher-qualified people generally command higher salaries, which means their retrenchment reduces costs faster than that of lower-paid staff.

And second, their qualifications may have become irrelevant with changing technologies. Younger people are more attractive to employers because they have been prepared for today's economy.

They are also perceived to be more enthusiastic and vigorous.

Can older people fight back? Probably, and they could start by demolishing the notion that old dogs can't be taught new tricks.

Surveys undertaken by the American Association of Older Persons show that employers generally rate older workers highly.

In one survey, older people rated 70 per cent higher than younger workers on everything that mattered in the workplace.

And if it is just a matter of acquiring computer skills and other knowledge-economy stuff, that's easily fixed, given the right attitude.

If all else fails redundancy could be seen as an enforced blessing.

* Selwyn Parker, who is 59, is available at wordz@xtra.co.nz