While some people plan on retiring early, others aim to remain active in the workforce for as long as possible. An intergenerational report has found that older Australians may be needed to work for longer, to ease the growing tax burden on the young.
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00:00 It's a really important issue and I think that when I saw that report actually in that
00:07 section my first thought was what about all the older people who really want to work and
00:11 I think it's the important thing and they're talking about how you can encourage older
00:15 people to work and I think that's really good all the various suggestions and so on but
00:18 the other side of it of course is employers and the culture of discrimination that is
00:23 very prevalent in the workforce and I think it's a real worry.
00:26 Before we talk about the ageing and the ageist workforce that is perhaps befalling us, what
00:31 are the benefits for someone who wants to continue working in later stages of life as
00:36 well as what are the benefits for the business, the corporation?
00:39 Well the benefits are of course meaning and purpose that a lot of people value above all
00:45 and in my book I actually have a chapter which talks about those people who actually just
00:49 go on working for the rest of their lives basically that's what they love doing, it
00:53 gives them satisfaction and nothing's stopping them but in other situations people want to
00:57 go on working and can't because of retirement matters and sort of conditions and so on but
01:04 the advantage and people can go on working full time or they might want to work part
01:10 time so you get the satisfaction of working and leisure time as well so that's really
01:15 an important part of a person's, many people's lives, not everybody wants to work all the
01:19 time but a lot of people do and some people have to because of the economic situation.
01:24 And what about for the cultural perspective from the employer, from the corporation, how
01:28 does that change things when you have older people working?
01:31 Well it can be a real benefit and people who've employed older people marvel at the way that
01:37 they can be inspirational, the way they can be mentoring and the way that they can actually
01:41 contribute in all sorts of very positive ways but the problem is how many employers do allow
01:48 that to happen and that's where we come to something where the brakes go on and I've
01:52 heard of so many stories of people who want to get work, keep on battering at the door
01:57 and keep on getting rejected and so the culture has to change.
02:01 There was a wonderful article that talked about in Great Britain apparently a group
02:07 of really big businesses have got together to work out how they can make the environment
02:14 for as satisfactory as possible for older people and having that kind of joint approach
02:20 I think something like that could work wonderfully in Australia as well when a whole lot of different
02:24 businesses Bunnings, Woolworths, whatever, you know you get together and you start to
02:28 say what can we do to have a really satisfactory intergenerational workforce which is going
02:34 to be really important because of course the problem is we're kind of getting that lopsided
02:38 demography now.
02:39 So how hard is it to shift ageism in the workplace and in the workforce because we've been talking
02:45 about this for a really long time and it really came to the fore especially with the pandemic
02:50 where we had labour skill shortages and there was this movement of well maybe older people
02:54 should be coming back into the workforce and some were but this ageism still exists so
02:59 how do we shift that?
03:00 Well there are organisations which are really working on trying to shift that.
03:05 The Benevolent Society started the Every Age Counts campaign on the basis of research which
03:09 showed that ageism was really quite extensive and they actually, I don't know if you can
03:18 see that, but they're tackling ageing in various ways including in the workforce and it's a
03:25 case of battering and it also may well be a case of need and now we're looking at the
03:30 situation where people are saying hey we've really got practical reasons for changing
03:35 the culture, up till now it's been social but I think people are now getting quite alarmed
03:39 and that could be the answer.
03:43 You mentioned the UK before and speaking to that point Emma about changing the culture,
03:47 you mentioned the UK and companies banding together, there was a headline out of Japan,
03:50 Japan last year 40% of companies hired someone over the age of 70.
03:57 What other countries around the world should we perhaps be looking to for ideas?
04:01 I understand Germany also has a super aged economy.
04:05 Well this is something which I have to admit I haven't looked into so I can't actually
04:09 talk about what some of the other countries have done but certainly if there are countries
04:14 that have set up good models it's really important and I know that in America Mark Friedman some
04:19 years ago set up a model for what he called second chance careers where people could actually
04:28 retrain into something that gives them satisfaction and meaning and he tried to get that model
04:32 up in America, it wasn't very successful, he came to Australia, tried to get it up here
04:36 and it wasn't very successful so there are approaches out there for people to come and
04:42 sort of look at and maybe we might at this time take up some of his suggestions.
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