United Kingdom: Industry by Industry Reports on Tackling Age Discrimination and Promoting Age Diversity in Employment

The Age Partnership Group has issued research that encourages employers to tackle age discrimination practices and recognise the benefits of older workers. Each of nine industry sector-specific reports look at the challenges faced by the sector relating to the recruitment, training and retention of older workers.

Specifically, the nine sector research reports include Business services, Construction, Education, Health and Social Care, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Retail, Transport and Logistics, and Other community (media, sport, public services, the arts).

The research found that eight sectors use length of experience to fix starting salaries or as a criterion in selection for recruitment and retention; seven sectors use age or length of service as the basis for redundancy decisions; five sectors provide age information on candidates to short-listing and interviewing staff; four sectors set maximum or contractual retirement ages and for two of these sectors the contractual retirement age is often below 65.

The reports also examine what employers are doing to remove compulsory retirement ages and adopt flexible approaches, as set out in the Pensions White Paper, as well as looking at how the age legislation affects young people in the workforce.

Source: Age Positive News Release (August 10, 2006)