October 11, 2011
Having been steadily phased out since April this year, compulsory retirement has now been fully abolished. Employers will now be unable to compulsorily retire their employees at 65, which it had been argued was ageist. Whilst organisations such as Age UK welcomed the change they still warned that ageism is rife in the workplace.
Age UK’s head of policy for work and learning, Christopher Brooks said "Many employers simply see the stereotypes of an older worker, particularly in the recruitment phase and statistics show older workers find it harder to find another job than any other age group. Discrimination in the recruitment process is against the law, but it still happens in practice quite a lot. It is however quite hard to prove but we do get lots of feedback from people who have been in interviews and been told they are over qualified or just too old to do the job, which quite often amounts to age discrimination." Age UK have urged employers to consider the benefits of employing candidates with a wealth of experience.
However some quarters argued the move did nothing to prevent workplace discrimination, but simply made life more difficult for employers. Andrew Cave from the Federation of Small Businesses commented “it will lead to a legal quagmire for a lot of small business owners. If you can't get rid of someone, you then have to go through the process of performance managing someone out of an organisation, which if you have a big HR department and you're experienced in these things is easy."
