It is a fine line between ensuring that people over 50 are not discriminated against in the workforce
and
making it difficult for older people to have the right to retire.
Let’s face it. We do get older and often it also means frailer more aches more disabilities.
Being forced to stay in the workforce competing with much younger people in a brutal world is torture for most.
We do change as we get older. The workforce of yore used older workers as respected mentors (nice idea anyway). Now older workers are unlikely to be respected as mentors. Young people now are more likely to treat older workers as outdated. Older workers are more likely to be substantially or drastically downgraded in level and pay to a job which is very menial even if they are highly experienced and qualified.
Young workers have every reason to be assertively climbing their own career ladder. They have their families to support and their social position to forge. Older workers sitting in plum jobs are unwelcome barriers to advancement for younger people.
There needs to be a safe way for older people to get out of the way gracefully and without personal damage not be forced to stay in the fray and be emotionally mutilated and destroyed.
Another aspect older workers face is very different cultural values. We hear the words ‘respect’ and ‘tolerance’ over and over and over nowadays but older people are very unlikely to have their cultural heritage and values respected and given equal place in the workforce. Older people can find themselves in situations in the workforce where younger people are talking and behaving in ways that would have been considered intolerably inappropriate ‘in the olden days’ but they get no help to deal with this behaviour from work colleagues.