Similarly, unemployment provision can be redesigned to be less punitive. Older people can be encouraged to use their skills for training and transition support, which would be a half-way house between their old jobs and retirement. They can be moved towards self-employment of various kinds.
And so on.
The point is that age discrimination, pensions provision, and voluntary extended working are all separate issues. So is skills loss, and so is the usual employer need to cut costs by hiring teenagers who work for pocket money.
You could reframe this with evidence that older employees provide a better overall return because they're more skilled, more effective, and more reliable. Getting rid of them is a false economy.
This isn't just rhetoric. Organisations have been destroyed by short-sighted skills loss.
It needs a packaged push-back, not a single-issue pushback.
I'd concentrate on the pensions angle and less on the Jobs™ angle. What's needed is a push back on pensions provision increased returns decreased insecurity government reassurance that both public and private pensions are protected in the same way that we've seen banking speculation being back-stopped and protected.
In other words, better public pensions, paid for out of general revenue. In a market-based system, 1) and 2) are mutually exclusive, and 3) amounts to nothing better than privatising profits and socialising risk.
Provide decent public pensions. And if people then want to set aside more money (which should not be tax deductible, by the way, any more than buying ordinary securities should), then they get to carry the full risk that goes with that if they put it in anything that is riskier than German sovereign debt.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
