TRANSCRIPT:
It's a challenging time to be aged in your 50s in Australia.
The group is often known as the sandwich generation, balancing caring responsibilities for their aging parents and their children.
And now, a new report sheds light on a concerning perception of the group in the workforce.
While they're still far away from Australia's official retirement age of 67, more employers are viewing their workers as older once they hit the age of 51, according to research by the Australian H-R Institute and Australian Human Rights Commission.
The study also found while half of employers responding to the survey find it difficult to fill vacancies, just 56 per cent of them say they are to a large extent open to hire workers aged 50 to 64.
Sarah McCann-Bartlett is the CEO of the Australian HR Institute.
She says there's been a drop of the minimum age perceived to be old.
"That's perhaps because we're in an era of really fast-paced technological change, and we know that there is an assumption, not necessarily correct, that older workers are not as good with technology as younger workers. And I think the other reason could be we've got a younger generation who are wanting to work (faster) through their careers and having career opportunities faster. So those two could be coming to bear a little bit around that view of what age a worker becomes older."
Despite that perception, Ms McCann-Bartlett says many employers actually find no differences in performances between older and younger workers.
Still, it's not a new reality that workers in their 50s are being sidelined, as they are perceived as older in the workforce.
Professor Carol Kulik from the University of South Australia has researched into the phenomenon of so-called 'queue jumpers', which refers to healthy workers choosing an early retirement in their 50s.
"I'd say that probably the biggest thing that we see, and there has been no change in this over time, is that hiring managers often make the assumption that they want to hire somebody who's going to give them a good return on investment, and so they believe that hiring a younger person means that the younger person is going to stay in the job longer, and an older person, well, the closer they get to retirement, the more likely they are to leave."
Professor Kulik says that's a mistaken assumption, as several studies have found young people tend to change jobs more frequently.
She says the reason it's so hard to change this is because some hiring professionals still hold outdated beliefs about the relationships between organisations and employees.
"We just have decades of an understanding of employment relationships where organisations would hire new employees based on potential, and they saw it as a long-term commitment, but we're seeing such dramatic changes in what people want from employment relationships. So for example, right now, we're seeing that 60 to 70% of new entrants to the labour force say that they don't want to become managers. Well, the way we've traditionally retained people is to promote them into managerial roles. So I think some of the thinking of hiring managers hasn't really caught up to what we're seeing in the data."
Age Discrimination Commissioner Robert Fitzgerald also says ageism in employment has been present for a long time, but it's time that Australia takes efforts to challenge it.
"Businesses today need to recognise that Australian society is changing, their customers are changing, and there is a need in many businesses to represent older faces and older voices in their businesses. There's also chronic labour shortages, and therefore businesses need to be able to meet those shortages, and the only way they're going to be able to do that is by engaging with older people."
Dr Marlene Krasovotsky is part of Everyage Counts, a community organisation against ageism.
She says as Australia has an ageing population, the phenomenon of 'the sandwich generation' will only get more and more common.
And one way to counter ageism is to allow people of various ages to work together.
"I hoped to see more of embracing the reality that our workforces are now multi-generational. We can have up to five generations in one workplace, and the challenge is to harness all of the different skills and contributions and perspectives and energies that everybody brings from different ages. So I'm hoping that maybe next time we see some more specific strategies around how to harness the potential and the productivity of multi-generational workforces, because these are all really critically important issues for our nation's productivity."
