www.adaptinternational.it, @ADAPT_bulletin, 8 April 2015 How to Prevent Early Retirement: Retain, Retrain, Recruit by Federica Romano The European population is ageing and, as confirmed by the European Commission (European Commission, Ageing Policy website, 2015), by 2025 more than 20% of Europeans will be 65 or over, with a particularly rapid increase in numbers of over-80s. People are living longer and consequently the landscape of the workforce is changing. Avoid early retirement, encouraging fuller working lives, will benefit both economy and workers. Dr. Ros Altmann’s independent report - “A New Vision for Older Workers: Retain, Retrain, Recruit” - to the UK Department for Work and Pensions, published on March 11, 2015, makes several recommendations to improve the working lives of English people over 50s, assuming that, in seven years, the number of people in the workforce aged between 50 and State Pension age will have risen to 13.8 million and the number aged 16-49 will have reduced by 700,000. The report focuses on the 3 “R”s: • Retain: ensure that older workers can keep their jobs through flexible working time in order to reconcile work and family needs; • Retrain: upgrade the skills of older workers to allow them a longer working life through a long-life learning system; • Recruit: update older workers on modern job search through social media. Dr. Altman claims that, with an ageing population, encouraging and enabling more people to work for longer will boost economic growth, both short-term and longer-term. The report also identifies self-employment as a possible way to ensure the flexibility that many older workers want or need because it offers the possibility to use the skills they have acquired over a lifetime of employment and the opportunity to rise to a new professional challenge. Among older workers, women face particular barriers in the workplace. The report highlights that older women usually welcome the opportunity to work on a part-time basis to be able to combine employment with caring responsibilities for a parent, partner, child or grandchild, but this is not always possible. Dr. Altman hopes that employers will begin to take the issue of managing older women’s care responsibilities more seriously. The report also includes recommendations to the government, the employers, the media and the employees themselves. The government is recommended to: • Raise awareness among companies on active ageing through specific research projects and communications campaign; 1 • Develop a national strategy to address adult skills gaps and ongoing retraining requirements; • Tackle age discrimination, imposing penalties for violation of law on discrimination and improving the service of employment centers in order to ensure better outcomes for older jobseekers and returning carers. Employers and businesses are recommended to: • Implement effective strategies to cope active ageing (for example through family crisis leave) and to retain the skills of older workers rather than losing them; • Provide adequate training opportunities for all staff, regardless of age and, if possible, retrain employees performing physically demanding jobs for other roles; • Welcome, during the process of recruiting, candidates of all ages, overcoming any unconscious prejudice. Media are recommended to: • Promote a rebranding of old age: the images used to accompany stories of older people are outdated and contribute to the negative connotations of over 50s; • Give more opportunities to older journalists with lifelong experiences and skills that could retrain for modern media if given the chance; • Avoid inadvertent ageism in media stories. Finally, to older employees is recommended to: • Rethink their working life considering the idea of retirement as a process rather than a oneoff event; • Accept the possibility of career change rather than stop working altogether; • Welcome flexible working as an opportunity to have a better work-life balance. The report concludes that changes are urgently required to overcome the many barriers to later life working. Even if an increasing number of employers, individuals and organizations recognize both the challenges of an ageing population and the benefits of employing older workers, age discrimination and unconscious prejudice remain general problems in the UK labour market. Indeed, Dr. Altmann’s recommendations can also be adapted to the Italian labour market in which, as monitored by Randstad’s Observatory on Active Ageing, workers over 50 have increased by 1.6 million between 2004 and 2012. In particular, it’s important to be aware, especially on a company level, of the potential of older workers, implementing, also in Italy, age management strategies. With an ageing population, in fact, only a stronger cooperation between governments, companies and employers to promote longer working lives will improve the welfare systems, employee’s satisfaction and the economy as well. Federica Romano @89fede_romano International Doctoral School in Human Capital Formation and Labour Relations ADAPT-CQIA University of Bergamo 2