Don't call us: The plight of the older worker

A minority of New Zealanders in their 50s are in paid work. TIM WATKIN reports on a social crisis that is hiding in the statistics.

Last year, John Bulkeley went for jobs washing dishes and pumping petrol. He wasn't successful. Neither was he hired for any of the 600 other jobs he went for in 1999. Nor the near 300 he's applied for this year.

"[I've been] knocking on doors, networking, whatever. Sometimes I sit for a couple of hours and think what else there is that I can do that I haven't already done."

Bulkeley doesn't suffer from a bad illness or a bad attitude. A sterling curriculum vitae includes time as Mobil Oil's Auckland regional sales manager, general manager of Gulf Harbour Marina, and a project manager for Fletchers Fishing in Norway and the United States. Yet in three years he's worked only in patches, for a total of nine months. He's humbled himself, even chasing unskilled jobs.

There's only one thing stopping Bulkeley from getting full-time work. It's there in every line on his face. He's 60. He's too old and has been for years.

"It's been confirmed by the management consultants I've talked to. They will openly admit that it's almost impossible to get a job for a male over 45. I have, on advice, even taken the dates off my CV, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that I'm a mature applicant. The whole process is very depressing."

When Dr David Thomson started his research a year ago, tracking censuses from 1951, the Massey University history professor was "surprised, if not stunned" by what he found: a social crisis hiding in the statistics.

Today, a minority of New Zealanders in their 50s are working. That's right - fewer than half.

Break down the numbers into gender and age groups and the gravity of the problem becomes clear. The percentage of women working during their 50s and 60s has risen from a low base dictated by women's historic role as homemaker, but Thomson says it appears to have reached a plateau. Just half of all women aged 50-54 are working full-time, while that figure slips below 40 per cent for women aged 55-59.

More significantly, given the number of households reliant on men as the major breadwinner, only half of New Zealand men aged 55 to 64 are working full-time. As recently as 1970, the figure was over 80 per cent.

That slide has ugly implications for national and individual prosperity. As the baby-boomers flow through into retirement, with fewer savings than assumed, it also threatens the Government's plans for funding superannuation.

"It's just a major policy issue," Social Services and Employment Minister Steve Maharey agrees.

"My mailbag is full of [letters from] men writing in saying there are real problems for mature people who simply can't get back in the workforce."

Thomson continues, "They're an invisible group. And that group is stretching down the age profile."

Make the same study of men aged 45 to 54, and the number in full-time employment (defined as 20 hours a week or more until the 1981 census and 30 hours a week or more since the 1986 census) has fallen from 95 per cent to 75 per cent. In other words, we're getting too old younger than before.

What's more, the situation is probably worse than it looks. The fastest-growing category of worker in recent years has been "relative assisting unpaid" in a family business. The numbers grew from 285 men aged 55-59 in 1986 to 1131 in 1996.

The reasons for the drop in mature employment are complex and still being researched. But growing levels of age discrimination and redundancies have been stand-out factors.

Trudie McNaughton, executive director of the Equal Employment Opportunities Trust, says, "Some employers don't want to see anyone over 45, just as an arbitrary way of narrowing down applicants ... As a culture, there's a celebration of youth here and an assumption that older people don't add value."

Our youth-obsession is financial as well as physical. Young people usually work for less. Further, many employers label mature workers as lacking energy and easily bored, hard to train and out of touch with technology, prone to sickness and, hey, they'll be retiring soon, so there's little return on any investment. Such thinking is both a false logic and a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Massey University survey, of 2137 Engineering Union members aged 55 and over, showed one in 10 had suffered some form of age discrimination; most commonly being excluded from computer training or passed over for promotion. Without training, older staff are soon under-performing, justifying the stereotypes through no fault of their own.

The survey also found 85 per cent had not voluntarily changed jobs in five years, indicating that investments made in older workers are not wasted.

It's a stark truth that the main contributors to Thomson's statistics are the thousands of older, working and middle-class men who, since the 1970s, have been the chief victims of what their bosses call retrenchment or down-sizing. Worst hit have been unqualified men like 64-year-old Mac Scott. He had worked at the Dulux factory for six years, three as foreman.

"I'd just started to make some decent money, then, bang. They closed the factory and shipped a lot of the work down to Wellington. I was 54. After that was a black hole."

The black hole lasted two years. He went for job after job, but who wants a 50-something man who left school at 15? The age discrimination was unspoken.

"You are never told straight out. They just say you've missed out this time. But you can read between the lines.

"My worry was whether I would ever get another job. The wife was working, which made a difference, but it was hard on the kids."

Scott had been on the health and safety committee at Dulux so, with some offsiders he met at the Auckland Mature Employment Service, he set up a consultancy. With Taskforce Green start-up money it was successful until three years ago, when the trio parted. Undeterred, Scott took an adult teaching course at Manukau Polytech and became school systems administrator at the mature employment service, where he's still working. His advice: It's never too late to get new qualifications.

And if he'd not been able to find work since being laid off? He breathes out slowly. "Just don't know."

There are no New Zealand figures measuring the extent of redundancies or who they harm most. Australian Government statistics released this year state that "retrenchment rates were lowest at ages 35 to 44. They were highest for persons aged 55 to 64."

Anecdotal evidence from those working with mature unemployed people here concurs: most of the men they see did not resign, retire or get sacked. They were laid off.

Discrimination and redundancies are issues the Government can, and is, grappling with. But behind them Thomson sees in the shadows two more fundamental reasons for growing mature unemployment. Reasons that nation states find harder to fight.

First, his analysis shows the number of jobs in New Zealand has been declining over 30 years, largely unaffected by boom or bust cycles or changing government policies. That's in line with global trends. The changes are structural, and Thomson comes to the frightening conclusion that "paid employment has been disappearing from modern life, particularly after age 50.

"The drive for efficiency emphasises minimum employment, maximum shareholder returns. So there's a drive in global capitalism to minimise employees."

Jobs are being automated; moved to poorer countries where wages are lower; or young, mobile workers are being lured overseas.

But if we grow our economy, the market will provide more jobs, won't it? That's been the mantra muttered by governments here for 15 years. Thomson says, that approach is out-dated. "We have entered a new era. Modern economies don't necessarily generate jobs. We can have what's called jobless growth."

He points to Australia to illustrate.

"They've had their highest sustained growth ever through the 90s. But the number of people in work per 100 is just the same as before."

Second, the trend has been towards a shorter working week and a shorter working life. Already countries such as France and Italy are moving towards 35-hour working weeks. OECD research shows a man in a typical member country in 1960 could expect to work some 46 years, with three years without work. Today, the same typical man can expect to spend just 38 years in employment, but live eight years longer.

It all equals less work, especially for the middle-aged. And that creates a social avalanche. Thousands of New Zealanders in what has long been regarded as their peak earning years, the summit of their careers, have been knocked off the slope. It rocks individual self-confidence, family life, social and economic prosperity.

Australian statistics show that unemployed men aged 45 to 55 are 37 per cent more likely to die than their working peers. The British Medical Journal reports: "The evidence that unemployment kills, particularly in the middle age group, verges on the irrefutable."

Even if lives aren't lost, lifestyles can be. Bulkeley was a keen yachtie, but that pastime is one of many now abandoned. "If there's no income you're very limited in what you can do socially. You can't even say, 'Come out for a meal,' because you can't afford it."

He's not alone. Ask Joanne Brown.

"I've heard so many stories like that. They even have to sell the house because they can't afford the rates. They've applied for 100 jobs and got one interview."

Brown is completing a PhD at Victoria University on how people aged 50-65 cope with job loss. She has seen the impact on her sample group of 150 people, of whom 40 per cent have been diagnosed with depression.

"If you have been working your guts out for all these years and you get tossed aside, and then you're watching all your assets get ripped away because you can't afford to hang on to them, you feel totally used."

If the immediate impact isn't bad enough, more trouble is on its way a decade from now when baby-boomers start retiring en masse. Governments worldwide have been raising the retirement age and urging retirement saving in the belief that if people have more time to work and save, they can curb the burgeoning public cost of superannuation. The message: Work longer, save harder.

"People need to be working until they're 65. That's the ideal," says Brian Murphy, whose Christchurch company, Grey Skills, markets self-employed handymen over the age of 40.

"The reality is that it's not happening."

Says Thomson: "It presupposes good employment in your 50s and 60s. The retirement ads never say what will happen if people lose their last job at 53."

There's the flawed assumption. You can't work more when there's less work. And 50 per cent of our older workers can't save for their retirement because they're not working.

Maharey: "It not only means they're not working. You've got people down-sizing their houses, spending their savings, getting into their super early."

Add in the fact that the number of New Zealanders in their 50s and 60s will reach record numbers in the next 20 years - from 533,000 in 1996 to 878,000 in 2020. Even if the percentages of mature unemployed stay the same, the problem will get bigger.

There may yet be solutions. By portending a shrinking job market, Thomson is in what he calls the pessimist camp.

The optimists look at the growth of global trade and, paradoxically, the size of the baby-boomer bulge for signs of hope. Once the baby-boomers start to retire, there will be a labour shortage that the smaller, following generations won't be able to follow.

Optimists say employers will have to offer better pay, more flexible hours, phased retirement, anything to keep them on.

"After 2010," Australian economic forecaster BIS Shrapnel predicts, "employers will desperately need their older employees because there won't be enough young ones."

London investment house Daiwa goes further. "The growth of the active [working] population is simply going to collapse over a few years. Certainly, the unemployment story will be taken care of."

While Maharey, a former sociology lecturer, is sceptical of Pollyanna predictions, he feels Thomson is "a bit lugubrious."

"I think he's right about the general trend. But the full employment message is something most people now talk about. The days of assuming globalisation and automation were simply going to end up in very little work for anybody hasn't proven to be true. You go to a place like Holland. Literally, they're saying we live in a country jam-packed full of people, but we have a labour shortage. We just can't find people to do these jobs."

What's really missing are the right skills. Employers won't beg mature workers to stay unless they have the knowledge they need. Maharey says the challenge for his tenure is to make life-long learning and retraining a reality for older workers, to help them become "a different kind of worker."

The issues are close to home for Maharey. His 46-year-old wife, Liz, is starting a consultancy and her first client wants her to use the computer programme Excel.

"But Liz doesn't do that, so she's training herself.

"Our focus is trying to get a policy framework which will say we want more mature people getting jobs, promoting them to employers, making it easier for them to gain skills. And the big picture is that we are relatively optimistic about the fact we are going to have a rising demand for labour as we move in to the new economy."

Promoting the benefits of older workers shouldn't be as hard as it is. Experience, reliability, loyalty, knowledge. These are employer-friendly assets older workers tend to have in spades while, as Brown says, "[younger workers] are going to get whatever experience they want out of the system, then go somewhere else."

She tells the story of a cake-shop owner who took on an older worker with trepidation.

But he said to me, "He's so hard working. He just gets on with it, not like the younger ones I have to keep an eye on".

In Britain, there are signs that grey is groovy. Shell is using senior managers to mentor small businesses, Midland Bank is bringing back older managers to fill an experience void, the BBC is increasingly contracting staff over retirement age and B&Q retail stores are recruiting older sales staff. They have found absenteeism rates 39 per cent lower among old workers.

The EEO Trust says there are few such signs here, but Christchurch-based Grey Skills is hoping to open 30 branches nationwide to help over-40s into self-employment.

Maharey is promising some urgent action. Money is being spent on "pilot work" to tailor some Winz services to older people in cooperation with Mature Employment Services.

"We're not bereft of ideas, but we are at the beginning of a huge, complex problem."

Which offers little salve to people like Bulkeley. He goes on getting older and the work goes on getting harder to find. "You get to the point where you don't know what to do next," he says. "But you've got to keep on trying."