Older people struggling to find and keep employment
Photo:
RNZ
Sue has decades of experience in law and engineering. She is competent and can solve complex problems.
But when she was out of work last year, she was applying for half a dozen jobs every day for four months. But she had no luck.
Now 66, Sue thinks her
age was the problem
, and she has reason to believe so.
"I got one response. She phoned me up from Australia and asked me over the phone: 'I need to verify your age.' And when she found out what age I was, that was it."
Sue came back to New Zealand in 2020. It was during the Covid pandemic and she felt safer to be home.
However, other than a few contracts Sue landed through a connection, she had no luck anywhere else.
Sue did not want to give her last name because she does not want her client to know her age made job hunting so hard.
"I think everybody brings something unique to a job and maybe people think that because you are older that you're going to be slow or maybe you can't use technology or maybe you want too much money.
"But those are all assumptions. The guiding principle is that assume makes an ass of you and me."
New data shows
growing ageism in Australia
with 25 percent of employers classifying over-50s as being older, while only 10 percent thought so two years ago.
People like Sue think it is not much different in New Zealand.
Yvonne Weeber is now 64. For the last 20 years she has removed anything on her CV that may give away her age.
"As soon as you start getting into your 50s, even in your late 40s, people start looking at you and wonder why you haven't become a manager. For me it was more about I enjoyed the role I was in. I do enjoy leadership skills but it's not my main thing."
Weeber said she spent her entire working life specialising in one field, but decided to change her career path in 2021 after a six-month redundancy.
She said it is often perceived that older people are incapable of learning new things. But that was not true.
While it took her some time to learn the new systems and ways of doing work, she ended up doing quite well.
"Initially I thought if this doesn't work out I'd need to start looking for other jobs, and at one stage I was. And then I thought actually I really enjoy what I'm doing, I started to see ways of actually improving things and getting things to work better."
Employment lawyer Jills Angus Burney said ageism not only affected those who were job hunting - older people were
often affected during restructures
.
"Some of those people are not eligible for the pension, they've got to stand down for weeks and weeks to get the unemployment benefit and they're competing with other people to try and get another job. And they've got to keep looking for work because otherwise they're questioned by Work and Income as to whether they're entitled to get an unemployment benefit. It's catch 22."
Employment lawyer Jills Angus Burney.
Photo:
supplied
Angus Burney said over the last 18 months, she had been seeing more cases of older people being made redundant through improper processes.
Since 2022, unemployment rate for those age groups over 45 had been increasing steadily.
Those between the ages of 55-64 historically saw a lower unemployment rate than those aged 45-54, but this had changed over the last two years.
Unemployment among over-65s had now risen to above 2 percent for the first time since September 1993.
So, is it fair for employers to consider personal circumstances like age when making redundancy decisions?
"You can't discriminate in employment law. You can't discriminate on the basis of age or whether someone's got three kids or not, or whether someone's got grown up kids, or got grandchildren. You can't take into account someone's personal situation. And if you're releasing people based on qualifications, you got to show how you reached that position. You've got to be transparent."
Grey Power national president Gayle Chambers said redundancy did not get easier as you aged.
She said even for people who retired at 65, many of them still had mortgages to pay.
"Quite often people are still not mortgage-free when they leave work, and I know of one
man in his 80s who still had a mortgage
, quite a high mortgage actually."
And competing for jobs was not getting easier either.
"As far as getting a job is concerned, it is definitely a lot harder for older people to get positions of any note. They will be employed in the likes of supermarkets and as motel cleaners, rather than jobs of administrators or an lawyer's office."
She calls for employers to think about what they are loosing to ageism.
"If you've got a loyal employee who is still giving the same degree of competency to their job, they should not be discriminated against because of their age, because those people, when they leave a job, maybe they've been there, 10 or 20 years, you've lost all that knowledge."
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