To engage the Wealth
Of Wisdom to be
found amongst older people
OLDER PEOPLE WRITTEN OFF BY AGE DISCRIMINATION LAWS (continued)
The
new employment laws will help people who wish to go on working for their
current employer: they will not help older people who are trying to return
to work, such as Dinah Warnock (pictured left) who had her contract
terminated before she could start because she was 67 years of age, or people
who are trying to change their job.
That employers will still be able to have a retirement age of 65 yrs and legally reject applications from people over the age of sixty-four years and six months is discriminatory in the extreme. Those continuing to work will have their employment rights extended: those out of work, or wishing to change their job, will have no rights what-so-ever. This is both inconsistent and discriminatory. Just imagine the outcry if it were legal not to short list women, not to short list black people, not to short list people with disabilities. And yet it continues to be legal not to short list people over the age of 64 years and 6 months. This is just not acceptable.
59% of respondents in a recent national survey said they envisaged working on beyond the age of 65 years and yet 64% of respondents in the same survey felt it was virtually impossible to get work over the age of 55 years. There are currently 2.8m people, a third of the population, between 50 and 65 years out of work and the number of men out of work in this age group has doubled over the past thirty years. The new legislation will help these people.
83% of delegates at Age Concern Hampshire’s 2003 “Worthy Of Work and pensions” conference thought there should be no fixed retirement age and that people should be allowed to go on working for as long as they choose or are able – deciding when it is right for them to retire - and this had increased to 100% by October 2005. 83.3% thought that the age at which people could, if they so chose, draw their pension should be entirely separate to an age at which they must retire.
Britain is currently ranked 27th in the 30 most developed Countries in the world for its level of State Pension. When the earnings link was removed in 1981 the state pension was just 24% of national average earnings, it is now 15% and by 2012 is likely to be as little as 12%. There was a 37% erosion of prices linked pensions, both state and occupational, against earnings between 1981 and 2000 and now the 2004 Pension Act has capped the maximum annual uplift for inflation on occupational pensions at 2.5%. If inflation were to run at 3% this would halve the purchasing power over a twenty year period on top of the 37% erosion. /cont....
Putting the
WOW
into retirement
