AARP Expands Featured Employers Program

The AARP has expanded its "Featured Employers" program by collaborating with 11 additional major companies to help Americans aged 50 and over remain in the workforce as desired. In announcing the expansion, AARP CEO Bill Novelli said that "[a]s more and more workers reach traditional retirement age, there are not enough new workers to replace them. We are working with forward-thinking companies who value older workers to offset labor and knowledge gaps. This is a winning strategy for American business, for the older workers themselves and for our national economy."

Source: News Release AARP November 17, 2005

Age Discrimination Visible, but U.S. Businesses Urge Older Workers to Stay on the Job

According to a Hudson survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports, LLC, while 23% of the U.S. workforce knows of an older worker who has been denied a job, promotion, or raise because of age, more than twice as many businesses encourage older workers to stay on the job than to retire early; in fact, 38% of workers say their organizations keep older workers because they are difficult to replace, compared to 15 percent whose firms want to make way for younger workers.

Source: News Release The Hudson Employment Index November 16, 2005

Australia: Industry Not Stepping Up To Challenge of Aging Baby Boomers

A report from ABC Melbourne says that, at a recent seminar sponsored by Monash University’s Australian Centre for Research in Employment and Work, participants were told that, "despite the Federal Government pushing for greater participation of older workers in the labour market, industry is failing to develop proactive approaches for keeping Australia’s baby boomers in the workforce." Dr Glennis Hanley, from Monash University’s Department of Management, said that "[b]usinesses need to employ the broad-based business experiences of baby boomers to foster and transfer cross-generational knowledge as a means of integrating the diverse abilities of today’s heterogeneous workplace." According to Dr Tui McKeown, also from the Department of Management, by 2020 that 50 per cent of the current workforce will have retired and "[n]o action is currently being taken to recognise the skills of older workers." Drs. Hanley and McKeown are conducting research on Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I'm 64?.

Source: ABC Melbourne November, 28, 2005