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Employers can't afford to ax mature workers, say researchers:
In a new article in the Australian Journal of Management, researchers warn employers not to make hasty decisions in either dismissing or discounting the input of older workers.
"Employers are well known for targeting mature workers when downsizing their workforce—but this might be a costly mistake," says Dr. Valerie Caines.
She notes that governments can also overlook the value of older workers, as shown by the SA Government recently pulling its funding to DOME (the Don't Overlook Mature Experience training organization), which provided valuable support services to mature job seekers.
"A common mistake is to think of mature workers as all being the same," says Dr. Caines. "There is huge variation among mature workers' motivations, capabilities and needs. Their experience is especially valuable now, because mature workers can offer considerable value to an organization during a crisis and play an important role in helping a business progress to the 'next normal.'"
Dr. Caines says older workers may also hold the solution for filling employment gaps in organizations, due to diverse skill sets they have developed through their working life.
"Mature adults demonstrate considerable resilience," she says. "The aspect of role modeling resilience is an especially important influence on younger workers. It includes mature coping strategies, emotional intelligence and empathy—and these attributes have never been more important in the workforce."
Journal Reference:
Valerie Dawn Caines et al. Older workers: Past, present and future, Australian Journal of Management (2020). DOI: 10.1177/0312896220918912
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:47PM (2 children)
I was 'let go' a while back, along with a couple of other 'fossils'. We'd built the business up from nothing to selling items globally that we'd designed and manufactured. Everyone 'let go' was over 50, we'd decades of experience in multiple fields, worked well as a team, but now, told to more or less 'fuck off', mostly have set up as self-emloyed businesses in direct competition to our old employer.
The particular 'business unit ' of our old employer that we worked in started failing some time after our 'departure'. It was circling the drain in the months before COVID (website had stopped accepting new orders). it was both painful and sad, sort of, watching the young 'certified' geniuses that replaced us piss away the work of better part of a decade that we'd put in building it all up, but, as they say, 'shit happens' and also 'what goes around, comes around', they're not going to survive COVID, übermanglement is using the virus and lack of orders as the excuse to close it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday June 30 2020, @10:23PM (1 child)
If your employer "let go" only people over 50 then you can make a compelling case for age discrimination.
This shouldn't impact your current work, could get you some cash, and would punish your former employer. You might consider it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2020, @07:54PM
A couple of us thought about it, saw the lawyers, but the eventual consensus however was that we wanted absolutely nothing further to do with the company. It would have been nice to screw some money out of them, but we were of the opinion that all that would have meant was that some other 'low hanging fruit' would have lost their jobs to pay for it, we couldn't live with that.
It was becoming an extremely 'toxic' place to work at in the six months leading up to us being 'let go'. Not long after we'd departed, the CEO responsible for the cuts also left, and the new CEO was from an outfit where he was used to a 150K+ salary & benefits...so there were more cuts, more internal backstabbing - one member of staff, we were told, walked out after being victimised and harassed for six months, which he reported, and they brought a disciplinary action against him. Again, he was well north of 50, but in his case he knew where some of the financial bodies were buried, and apparently he's been trying to interest the financial authorities and newspapers about some fairly major irregularities...remember I said that a CEO left?, turns out he'd done some prison time many years ago for fraud.