Age is one of the newest “-isms”. Almost invisible as an issue in the 1970s and early 1980s, the idea that older people had as much right to work as a 25-year-old began to catch on sometime after 1985.
Ten years before, in the recession of the mid-seventies, the consensus was that employees in late middle age ought to make way for unemployed youth. During that decade, the scandal of young people being denied work because of their inexperience, combined with a huge decline in apprenticeships, led to major government investment in special programmes, such as the Youth Training Scheme launched in 1983.
At the same time, people were increasingly able – and keen - to accept early retirement funded by generous final-salary pension schemes and voluntary redundancy packages. This exodus of older workers was fuelled by the decline of manufacturing and the abandonment by employers of the “last-in-first-out” rule of redundancy which had disadvantaged young people. There was a lot of talk about getting rid of “dead wood”. Ostensibly, this meant employees who were not contributing; but there was an unspoken association with ageing and decay, implying that older people had run out of steam and couldn’t understand new technology.
By the mid-eighties, the workforce was starting to look rather different: younger, more service-oriented, with vastly more women under the age of 40. And some of those women, despite their comparative youth, encountered problems when they tried to return to work after having children.
Dianah Worman, the CIPD’s head of diversity and equality, points out that many companies still operated out-dated age barriers to training programmes and graduate recruitment schemes. Having encountered one such barrier herself in the early eighties, Worman rang the Institute of Personnel Management, as the CIPD was then, to find out if there was a law against it (there wasn’t). She joined the IPM a few years later and moved into her equal opportunities role: “Age was one of the first things we looked at because it was becoming more and more clear that people were having problems accessing jobs,” she says.
Reading issues of Personnel Management magazine (as People Management was then called) from that time, it is clear that – for some observers of the labour market – the alarm bells were already ringing. And it wasn’t just women returners who were having problems.
For instance, a news story in the June 1988 issue of PM (“Age limits in ads surveyed”) revealed that more than a quarter of job advertisements surveyed required applicants aged 45 and under, “indicating that recruiters still have not got the message on age discrimination”.
The following year, Department of Employment official John Robertson told a seminar at the IPD’s conference in Harrogate that ageism was “the subject of hundreds of letters received by the department”. In 1990, Peter Naylor, vice-president of equal opportunities for the IPM, declared himself in favour of legislation to protect older job applicants, in conflict with the IPM’s voluntarist policy ("Legal challenge", PM, 5 March 1998).
By now, the rising chorus of complaints was being backed up by cold statistics. No conference was deemed complete without a speech about the “demographic timebomb”: the expected decline in school-leaver numbers which policy-makers used to exhort employers to take on more women and older people.
The bomb was temporarily defused by the early 1990s recession. But by then pressure groups were springing up to press for fairer treatment of older people at work – and in society – and pointing to the longer-term trend in all leading economies towards an ageing population. In 1990 alone, PM reported the launch of the Third Age Employment Network, Age Works (a job-placement project for older workers), and the Carnegie Inquiry into The Third Age. The Carnegie Trust UK had identified a “new phenomenon”, the growing number of people in the 50-to-74 age bracket. The inquiry reported in 1993 and launched a debate and campaign to promote older people’s rights.
Richard Worsley, co-director of the Tomorrow Project, originally funded by Carnegie, believes the burgeoning of pressure groups helped change attitudes and push ageism up the political agenda. He also cites the realisation by some employers that their cult of youth had gone too far. “Large companies had been chucking out older people in vast quantities and they realised they were losing a lot of memory and expertise,” he says. “As the economy turned round, they decided it was a crazy thing to have been doing.”
Worman agrees that pioneering employers, particularly in the retail sector, played a key role. Asda launched its campaign to target the 50-to-70 age group for recruitment in 1988 ( “Asda campaign” ) and B&Q announced in 1989 that it was filling vacancies in its Macclesfield store with older workers ( “DIY for over-50s” ). In the same year, Tesco started a “Life Begins at Fifty” recruitment campaign. “Managers were becoming more aware that older people had skills to offer,” Worman recalls.
Supporting them and helping to spread the message was the IPM, one of the leading campaigners against age discrimination. The institute invited pioneering employers to speak at its conferences alongside commentators and academics who challenged stereotypes about older people. It also reported on the debate in Europe, including the 1993 European Year of Older People and Solidarity Between Generations.
In 1991, the institute launched its statement on age discrimination and in 1996 supported the formation of the Employers’ Forum on Age. This was a red-letter year for the anti-ageist lobby, with PM becoming the first publication in the UK to ban mention of age limits in job ads, launching its own campaign in support.
"If we were ever going to change patterns of thinking about age in the wider business world, then HR departments and recruitment agencies had to get their house in order first," says Rob MacLachlan, editor of People Management at the time. "When we decided to make a stand, we were astonished at the response. We lost a handful of adverts, but were applauded and encouraged throughout the HR and recruitment sector. It was a risk – but the campaign actually turned out to be a shot in the arm for our own business."
At the heart of the campaign was a pledge, drawn up by PM and the Carnegie Third Age Programme and signed by more than 65 recruitment advertising agencies, setting out their view of best practice in this area (see below). Features over the next few years included case studies of good practice, a look at elderly people in the workforce and an article on “gradual retirement” by Genevieve Reday-Mulvey, from the Geneva Association, a European group funded by insurance companies concerned about the future funding of pensions.
By this time – the late 1990s – the focus had widened from simply improving access to jobs and training for the over-40s to the need for people to continue working past the traditional retirement age as both the numbers of young people in the workforce and the expected size of pensions declined. As ageism became increasingly high-profile, the Labour Party – also in 1996 and with an election in the offing - pledged to legislate against age discrimination. Then, shortly after winning power, it backed down.
Campaigners were furious but the IPD stuck to its voluntarist stance. In the end, legislation was forced on the UK by the EU’s employment directive of 2000. The regulations arising from that directive take effect from this October. But, as Worman points out, after 20 years of campaigning perhaps employers should have got the message anyway!
1996: People Management’s pledge
The following statement, drawn up by People Management and the Carnegie Third Age Programme, was signed by more than 65 recruitment advertising agencies:
“We believe that excluding job applicants purely because of their age is never good recruitment practice. Accordingly:
a) We will not initiate the inclusion of age limits in recruitment advertisements which we prepare for our clients
b) We will question any request by our clients to include such limits.
If a client insists on including such limits, we will seek to include the reasons for the limits and we will not exclude from consideration any applicants outside the limits.”