Description:
With current policy concerns about shortfalls of labour supply and effects on the social welfare system due to population ageing, there is a need to understand the factors that shape women's choices about if, when and how to retire. Recent trends indicating the increased workforce participation of women demand new policy responses to the end of careers and retirement transitions to sustain acceptable levels of participation and productivity. This book is innovative in that it will examine constellations of factors that disadvantage or advantage women's career and retirement trajectories against a backdrop of public policy efforts to extend working lives.
Description:
Chapter 6 reports older women survey respondents’ expectations about retirement; their financial preparation for retirement; and factors that pushed them out of the workforce such as declining health and poor working conditions. Older women workers demonstrated a generally positive orientation to retirement. However, financial preparedness was a concern, with a significant proportion reporting that their understanding of their superannuation was poor. Findings with regards to self-esteem and social contact point to the need to support older women in building post-work identity and structures outside of work.
Description:
Chapter 7 reports qualitative interviews with older women about the pursuit of an active, fulfilling and productive retirement, and the mechanisms that promote these outcomes. Contrary to notions of the blended lifecycle, analysis reveals a stark division between paid work and retirement for many women at the same time as an ongoing commitment to socially valued and productive albeit unpaid activities that form a portfolio career. Furthermore , analysis reveals an increased sense of autonomy and control over decision making among retired women that contrasts with their experiences of paid employment.
Description:
Chapter 8 reports qualitative interviews with older women, drawing from the concepts of biographical work-life balance and portfolio careers. It focuses on older women who were in part-time work but who self-identified as having made a transition to retirement. Many had longstanding careers and stable networks, accrued skills and financial resources, supported a well-endowed quality of portfolio lives, whereas those who experienced ‘unbalanced’ portfolio retirement were more likely to be lacking resources from their working lives. The analysis reinforces the notion that retirement should be viewed as a process and not an event and that it is impossible to tell a single story of women's post-work transitions.
Description:
Chapter 9 explores conceptions older workers, drawing from interviews with human resources managers and expert stakeholders. Analysis revealed pervasive discrimination based on age and gender and a lack of recognition of the diversity of older workers. They are generally understood in essentialized terms as a single group sharing certain stereotypical attributes. An essentialized discourse of decline underpins representations of older workers. It is argued that the idea of the older worker needs to be problematized.
Description:
Chapter 4 reports the experiences of older women survey respondents in terms of job satisfaction, work-life balance, perceptions of working hours and what determined these, perceptions of treatment by managers and co-workers, perceptions of labour market age barriers, and participation in skills development activities. The findings are indicative of relatively benign workplace environments. Job satisfaction was high and women generally appeared able to juggle work and other responsibilities. Working hours were a concern for some women, particularly those in casualized employment. Participation in learning and development activities declined with age and was more common among those with higher skill levels. Workplace discrimination was not a major feature of the experiences of these women.
Description:
With current policy concerns about shortfalls of labour supply and effects on the social welfare system due to population ageing, there is a need to understand the factors that shape women's choices about if, when and how to retire. Recent trends indicating the increased workforce participation of women demand new policy responses to the end of careers and retirement transitions to sustain acceptable levels of participation and productivity. This book is innovative in that it will examine constellations of factors that disadvantage or advantage women's career and retirement trajectories against a backdrop of public policy efforts to extend working lives.
Description:
With current policy concerns about shortfalls of labour supply and effects on the social welfare system due to population ageing, there is a need to understand the factors that shape women's choices about if, when and how to retire. Recent trends indicating the increased workforce participation of women demand new policy responses to the end of careers and retirement transitions to sustain acceptable levels of participation and productivity. This book is innovative in that it will examine constellations of factors that disadvantage or advantage women's career and retirement trajectories against a backdrop of public policy efforts to extend working lives.
Description:
With current policy concerns about shortfalls of labour supply and effects on the social welfare system due to population ageing, there is a need to understand the factors that shape women's choices about if, when and how to retire. Recent trends indicating the increased workforce participation of women demand new policy responses to the end of careers and retirement transitions to sustain acceptable levels of participation and productivity. This book is innovative in that it will examine constellations of factors that disadvantage or advantage women's career and retirement trajectories against a backdrop of public policy efforts to extend working lives.
Description:
With current policy concerns about shortfalls of labour supply and effects on the social welfare system due to population ageing, there is a need to understand the factors that shape women's choices about if, when and how to retire. Recent trends indicating the increased workforce participation of women demand new policy responses to the end of careers and retirement transitions to sustain acceptable levels of participation and productivity. This book is innovative in that it will examine constellations of factors that disadvantage or advantage women's career and retirement trajectories against a backdrop of public policy efforts to extend working lives.
Description:
This book reports on a large mixed-methods project Retiring Women: Understanding Older Female Work-Life Transitions funded by the AUstralian Research Council and three industry partners. The project aimed to explore, firstly, transitios into, within and out of the labour market from the perspectives of older women workers, their employers and industry stake-holders across three industry sectors, and secondly, the development of policy related to the recruitment and retention of such workers in the Australian workforce.
Description:
Objective: This study aimed to increase understanding of the nature and prevalence of discriminatory experiences in the workplace, focusing on issues of age and gender. Methods: The concept of everyday discrimination was operationalised in a survey of a representative sample of Australian workers. Results: It was observed that overall, experiences of everyday discrimination were rare. Among men, such experiences declined with age, whereas for women almost no age differences were observed. Conclusion: It is argued that the nature of labour market age barriers has been misunderstood and the extent of discrimination faced by older workers possibly overstated.
Description:
As with other industrialized nations Australia's population is aging and older workers are encouraged to work for longer. At the same time, Australia's university sector, which is aging, is being reconfigured through changes that potentially marginalize its older workers as higher education institutions try to become more competitive in a global market. In this context, youthfulness appears to embody competitiveness and academic institutions are increasingly aspiring to a young workforce profile. This qualitative article builds on previous research to explore to what extent ageist assumptions shape attitudes to older workers and human resource management (HRM) practices within Australian universities even when HRM practitioners are well versed in antidiscrimination legislation that (unlike the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in the United States) applies to workers of all ages. Semistructured interviews conducted with 22 HRM practitioners in Australian universities reveal that university HRM practices generally overlook the value of retaining an older workforce by conflating "potential" with "youthfulness," assuming that staff potential and performance share a negative correlation with age. While mostly lower-ranked institutions have attempted to retain older academics to maintain an adequate labor supply, this study finds that university policies targeting the ongoing utilization of older workers generally are underdeveloped. Consequently, the availability of late career employment arrangements is dependent upon institutions' strategic goals, with favorable ad hoc solutions offered to academics with outstanding performance records, while a rhetoric of performance decline threatens to marginalize older academic researchers and teachers more generally.
Description:
As with other industrialized nations Australia's population is aging and older workers are encouraged to work for longer. At the same time, Australia's university sector, which is aging, is being reconfigured through changes that potentially marginalize its older workers as higher education institutions try to become more competitive in a global market. In this context, youthfulness appears to embody competitiveness and academic institutions are increasingly aspiring to a young workforce profile. This qualitative article builds on previous research to explore to what extent ageist assumptions shape attitudes to older workers and human resource management (HRM) practices within Australian universities even when HRM practitioners are well versed in antidiscrimination legislation that (unlike the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in the United States) applies to workers of all ages. Semistructured interviews conducted with 22 HRM practitioners in Australian universities reveal that university HRM practices generally overlook the value of retaining an older workforce by conflating "potential" with "youthfulness," assuming that staff potential and performance share a negative correlation with age. While mostly lower-ranked institutions have attempted to retain older academics to maintain an adequate labor supply, this study finds that university policies targeting the ongoing utilization of older workers generally are underdeveloped. Consequently, the availability of late career employment arrangements is dependent upon institutions' strategic goals, with favorable ad hoc solutions offered to academics with outstanding performance records, while a rhetoric of performance decline threatens to marginalize older academic researchers and teachers more generally.
Description:
This article considers the characteristics and utility of pro-work policies targeting Australian older workers that have emerged in the context of population ageing, amid concerns that this will lead to labour shortages and an increasing social welfare burden. There has been a recent surge in public policy regarding the ageing workforce, the efficacy of which has not been tested by evaluation studies. After considering the conceptual foundations and objectives of various government initiatives, it is argued that the present public policy approach may have serious flaws that are not only detrimental to the stated overall objective of prolonging working lives, but may, in fact, be harmful to older workers and fail to address the needs of business. This stems from programs reaching only a small proportion of those older people who would potentially benefit from assistance, and from misdirected effort aimed at encouraging behavioural change on the part of employers or industries. It is argued that there is a need for greater targeting of policy efforts on the actual needs of industry and for public policy itself to become more age-aware. S (Australian Bureau of Statistics), 2010, Older People and the Labour Market, Australia, 2010 S (Australian Bureau of Statistics), 2010, General Social Survey: Summary Results, Australia, 2010
Description:
In recent decades there has been a shift in labor market public policy from a culture of early retirement to one centered on hiring older workers, i.e., those aged over 50. The culture of early exit flourished in most major industrialized economies until the 1990s. Previously, older workers who left the workforce prematurely were regarded to be early retirees rather than unemployed. Their joblessness ended not with their reentering the workforce but transferring to pensions (Casey and Laczko 1989). Subsequently, there has been a policy shift towards prolonging working lives that has been generated by population aging in general as well as the aging of workforces in specific industry sectors, such as nursing and teaching.
Description:
Against a background of population ageing, and with it, concomitant effects on social welfare systems and labour markets, public policy makers in affected nations are seeking ways of pushing out the final age of withdrawal from their labour markets. Central to such efforts is promoting the contribution of older workers to organizations and overcoming labour market age barriers. Within this advocacy approach there has been recent interest in identifying and promulgating examples of employer best practice in order to emphasize new dimensions of the business case for employing older workers. Drawing on literature concerned with advocating an ethical concern in human resource management as it pertains to older workers, this article examines an exemplar set of employer case studies aimed at promulgating best practice. It considers the concept of age management and its manifestations to argue that many standard HRM practices are firmly, although probably unwittingly, grounded in ageist assumptions concerning the capacities, potentiality and contributions of both younger and older workers. This, we argue, is a consequence of an unnecessarily narrow conception of good employment practice based in an economic rationality that is not conducive to the effective management of age in organizations.