Age diversity at work – or not
Interesting article here in Personnel Today reflecting on the state of age diversity in the UK following the outlawing of age discrimination in the workplace in 2006 and the abolition of mandatory retirement.
Emma Parry suggests that employers (mis)understanding of the legislation may be inhibiting diversity management approaches and that age stereotypes – of both older and younger workers – may still prevail.
Dr Parry is principal research fellow at Cranfield School of Management and co-author of the Acas paper “The Employment Relations Challenges of an Ageing Workforce.”
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Katrina Pritchard
Rebecca Whiting
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Interesting article by Emma Parry indeed.
It is also interesting to observe what the Belgian Government is doing in terms of supporting older workers’ status, please see http://www.mercer.com.au/newsletters/1457610#Belgium
Also attention-grabbing material can be found at “How BMW is Defusing the Demographic Time Bomb”. One of BMWs main plants located in Southern Germany found that the average worker’s age was going to increase from 39 to 47 by 2017. BMW, clearly, is not the only company facing this challenge around the world – but making older workers redundant or forcing them into retirement was not an option for them. For more details of this remarkable experiment and its significant findings, please see: http://hbr.org/2010/03/the-globe-how-bmw-is-defusing-the-demographic-time-bomb/ar/1
It may help to inspire other employers to follow up on their footsteps!