Looking For Employment Opportunities For The Older Generation, As The Age For Retirement Carries On Rising
Aug 31
There has been a suggestion from pensions think tank the Pensions Policy Institute that the normal retirement age be put up to over 70, in order to enable the government to keep the amount spent on pensions at a manageable level. This has worried many people, because it might mean that many people will have to forget the idea of ever getting a pension and may have to carry on working until they breath their last. But we should not forget another aspect to consider: what kind of work is going to be open to the over 50s? We cannot ignore the worrying degree of age discrimination in the workplace, and a lot of older people may not be able to either work or qualify for a pension. However there is a possible solution in the area of Internet business, in which they can work from home in a variety of online jobs.
Employers overall tend to prefer younger workers, but they also seem to demand a long period of previous experience. Somebody registering with a jobs agency was informed they were ‘long in the tooth’ although they were just 35. Discrimination on the basis of age is officially against the law, but the difficulty lies in proving when it is occurring.
On the other hand, life expectancy is a lot longer now than a few years ago. While everyone believes it is desirable to extend lifespans as much as medical science allows, there does not seem to be much consideration of the implications in terms of the need for a much bigger pensions pot. An additional issue is that birth rates are low, so that in the future, fewer people will be working and financing the pensions of a much enlarged number of old people.
Essentially, National Insurance doesn’t go into a fund for the payer’s old age, it is used to pay directly for current pensions. It is nothing more than an ‘IOU’ note for the NI payers of today, and many fear that when people now under 50 come to retire, not enough funds will be available to meet pension obligations.
A major charity has found that the number of unemployed people over 50 who have been on the dole for a year, has risen by over 50% over the past 12 months, as a direct result of the disproportionate effect of the jobs crisis on older generations. Three-quarters of the older longer term jobless are male, which tells us that older females may be better at getting temporary or part-time positions. The situation may well be exacerbated by the addition of hundreds of thousands of older people re-classified as able to work since they are no longer eligible for incapacity benefit, due to changes in government policy.
But what advantage would online jobs in Internet business offer for this predicament? Firstly, it is indisputably a line of work in which ‘silver surfers’ can offer as great a contribution as people in their twenties and thirties, and their enhanced life knowledge may be very helpful. Furthermore, such jobs allow people to work from home, so those who are disabled could nevertheless take up in such positions.
Discrimination against older workers may to a degree be caused by personal prejudice. If you see a person and judge them to be too old, then that person is not likely to get a job. In Internet business you can’t see the person you are doing business with, hence their age is unknown to you, so you don’t form such a quick judgement on the basis of such information.
In the face of rising pension ages and the fact that even young people cannot find jobs, let alone more mature individuals, the question of employment for the over 50s is not going to disappear. The ability to work from home in the online jobs created by Internet business may not provide a universal solution, however they are a genuine choice for many of the older generation.