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Tell me the old, old story

By: Nick Gillies and Neasa MacErlean
The Observer, July 23, 2000 

People over 50 find it harder to get jobs. Why? Employers talk frankly to Nick Gillies and Neasa MacErlean about the last legal bastion of bias.

'Young PR girls are enormously enthusiastic and will go running around like loonies to put in the extra mile,' says David, 50, a public relations consultant. 'Older employees don't seem to put themselves out as much. Occasionally I go to an educational function in the evening, and it is very noticeable that most of the audience is very young. It's probably a family thing. We want to get back to our families, but the young girls will combine work and social lives, and go out for a drink later.'

Anna, a 26-year-old PR consultant, is a good example of this attitude. She works in a company staffed mainly by women of her own age. She has friends who are becoming managing directors in other consultancies by the age of 30. But when they are older they might fall out of the labour market for a while: 'Most of us don't see ourselves as being in a nine-to-five job for the rest of our lives. There are so many options, such as travelling abroad.'

Frank Eve, 51, product strategy director of internet mortgage company E-loan, has a different, and more worrying, take on the difference between older and younger employees: 'The older you are, the more difficult it is to accept and adapt to change.'

Perhaps this is true. Learning has always been associated with youth - learning to drive, learning a new language. Although many older people surf the web, people who buy financial services through the internet are most likely to be in their thirties.

When Eve got his first job, his father congratulated him on the excellent pension scheme he was joining - which shows how different priorities were for that generation. Today, Eve is the oldest of the 50-strong team at E-loan, but he insists the company is not ageist: 'It is very important for a dotcom that people fit culturally. This is not an ageist thing, but a state of mind.'

Very few older people applied for work at its Redhill offices - perhaps selecting themselves out of a hi-tech business. Eve and his fellow directors set no age requirements, but do want people who adapt to change. Eve believes the proportion of older people in the workplace is set to grow: 'People coming through now will be more flexible in their approach to employment - more motivated by opportunity than by security.'

Michael, a company director, has just taken on a secretary nearly 15 years older than himself. Although he is clearly not ageist - insisting that he looks for people who want to continue learning, regardless of their age - he still notices age issues. 'I don't like it when people send in CVs without their ages on them. I do notice. I think that maybe they are embarrassed by their age.'

In an interview, he may be more worried by an older person who is still hopping from job to job every two years; a twentysomething doing the same may just have yet to put down roots. 'We might delve more deeply into their motivation. Most employers still want people who will stay at least two years. In an interview, older applicants have to present themselves as flexible and willing to learn.'

Losing touch with new developments can happen at all levels. One healthcare specialist bemoans the way surgeons over 50 are more likely to lag behind younger colleagues in their handling of new technology. A report in the Government's Labour Market Trends magazine in July 1998 highlighted a watershed: 'The age of 50 appears to be a turning point after which people find it more difficult to return to the labour force if they become unemployed or leave work for other reasons.'

They are more likely to suffer poor health: 17 per cent of men aged 45 to 49 suffer from long-term health problems, says the same report, compared with 27 per cent of men aged 60 to 64. The over-fifties are more likely to see redundancy as a way of taking early retirement. They put less effort into finding another job, and use 'fewer methods of job search'.

The incidence of ageism varies hugely from sector to sector, and between the employed and self-employed. The notoriously ageist IT industry will often pay 'a huge amount of money' to older self-employed consultants whom they would never consider putting on the payroll, says Louise Smith of JM recruitment consultants.

Ageism is 'rife' in banking, says Richard Lynch of the finance union Unifi. Between 5 and 6 per cent of bank workers are over 50, he says. Philip Marks, director of financial markets at Jonathan Wren recruitment consultants, says it is very hard for older people to get staff jobs: 'We're always told that older people can't handle the technology and can't keep up with the hours. Employers often say they are investing in training and want someone with a long-term career.'

Strangely, the high street banks were all founders of the Employers' Forum on Age, and they all say they want a workforce with a wide span of ages. But by getting rid of older workers in redundancy programmes, they saved a lot of money. In this hierarchical world, older workers had built up plenty of long-service increments and were more expensive to employ. The pension costs of older workers are much higher in the traditional 'final salary' schemes that banks used to run.

A cynic might say the banks joined the forum to head off legislation on ageism by suggesting that they were solving the problem internally. If this was their plan, it worked. The Labour Party, once committed to outlawing ageism, introduced a voluntary code of practice when it came to power. This was 'a damp squib' in terms of effectiveness, says employment solicitor James Davies of Lewis Silkin. While there are Government commissions to fight racism, sexism and discrimination against the disabled, there is no such body to tackle age prejudice.

Whatever happens, ageism will not go altogether. 'Middle-aged men do like to have young good-looking girls around,' says David the PR. 'I don't say this factor has clinched any £100,000 deals, but it may work subconsciously.'

'George', a politician nearing 50, laughs at the suggestion that he would employ a researcher of about his own age: 'Politicians are quite insecure. It suits them to have younger people who they can dominate. It would be an unusually self-confident politician who would employ a researcher of the same age - someone who could contradict them.'