MAIN MESSAGES of the SPEAKERS' CONTRIBUTIONS

Transcription

1 EESC Labour Market Observatory and the "European Year of active ageing and solidarity between generations 2012" coordination group Joint conference Wednesday, 20 June 2012 Activation of senior citizens Humanising working conditions for senior workers MAIN MESSAGES of the SPEAKERS' CONTRIBUTIONS Opening session Mr Verboven, copresident of the "European Year of Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations" coordination group opened the joint conference, welcoming speakers and participants. In his introduction, he briefed participants on the calendar of events organised by his group during 2012 and highlighted the value of the joint conference with the EESC Labour Market Observatory. He explained then in more detail why the activation of senior citizens was a growing necessity, but also how it would be counterproductive without a real commitment from social partners to humanise older people's working conditions. Mr Karel Van Damme, Member of the Office of the Belgian Minister for Employment, Monica de Coninck, speaking on behalf of the Minister, reiterated that the starting point for thinking about this issue should be that while financial conditions were important, older workers valued job content and a good physical and psychological working environment in particular, which improved their readiness to work until retirement age and even beyond. Belgium was setting up a government project to advise companies free of charge on how to adapt their work organisation and jobs to older workers and their abilities. Continuous training and preventive health and safety measures from an early stage and throughout working life were also crucial for the employability of workers as they got older. Ms Leina Samuel, 'Hors Classe' Adviser at DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, with special responsibility for the European Year of Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations 2012, recalled that most older Europeans found the idea of combining a partial pension with part-time working more attractive than being fully retired at a given age and that the proportion of Europeans who agreed to work beyond the age at which they became entitled to a pension rose with the age of respondents, reaching 41% among those aged 55 and over. However, adding a few years to working life would require a range of policies: to develop lifelong learning, improve the health status of older workers, adapt working conditions and working time arrangements, give the right incentives in the

2 2 social protection and tax systems, tackle age discrimination, and use the European Social Fund to promote active ageing in employment. Session 1: Activation of senior citizens Mr Donald Storrie, Head of the Employment and Change Unit, Eurofound, presented an introductory overview and outlook. To illustrate the situation he reminded participants that the current median age in Europe was 39.8, whereas it had been 31.5 in 1960 and was expected to be 47.2 in The old age dependency ratio (the percentage of 65+ compared with the age group) in the various Member States would increase substantially in the years to come (e.g. from two countries having a rate of over 30% in 2010 to 26 countries with a similarly high rate in If nothing were done the increase in the old age dependency ratio would lead to an appreciably lower GDP/capita. Basically three factors could alleviate this problem: an increase in labour productivity, more immigration, and an increase in the aggregate labour input. Mr Storrie believed that the key answer would be a more active and inclusive employment policy, and notably a longer working life. He was confident that employment rates for older workers would continue to increase in the years to come as many factors (continual decline in physically demanding work, continual improvement in health, better education levels, higher employment rates for women, etc.) pointed in this direction. Ms Barbro Westerholm, Member of the Swedish Parliament for the Liberal Party, sought in her presentation to answer the question as to why Swedes worked longer. She mentioned that the activity rate for the age group had risen from 62% in 1987 to 71% in Two important parallel phenomena were that the percentage of Swedes aged years who were in good or very good health had increased from 57 % in 1980 to 64 % in 2004, and that between 1985 and 2010 the percentage of people with a low level of education had been halved. An important factor for the longer working life in Sweden was the reform of the pension system in The reform established a stronger link between life income and pension (the longer you worked the higher the pension), created a right to work until 67 and included a correlation between the pension level and the economy of the country. She added that the Swedish fiscal system gave preferential treatment to those who worked as compared with those who did not. Ms Elżbieta Kryńska, Professor at Łódź University in Poland, explained that, in contrast to the previous speaker, older people in Poland had the second lowest employment rate in the EU. She showed that the employment rate of older workers (55-64) in Poland was more than 10 percentage points lower than the EU average, and that the situation for women was particularly dramatic (with a difference of more than 13 percentage points compared with the EU average). She identified four main groups of factors explaining this: legal factors (in Poland the legal retirement ages for women and men respectively were 60 and 65 but many professions were excluded from this statutory pension scheme and preretirement schemes meant that the actual retirement age was much lower than the legal age), political factors (in periods of unemployment access to preretirement schemes had been facilitated to reduce unemployment figures), labour environment factors (a favourable pension-wage ratio in particular for low-paid jobs, the ease with which pensions could be combined with undeclared work, widespread discrimination against older workers, competition with young people regarding skills, a lack of age-management in companies) and individual and institutional factors (notably limited access to (child)care and often poor health conditions).

3 3 Ms Ilaria Savoini, Senior Adviser for Social affairs at EuroCommerce, presented the views of EuroCommerce, which represents employers in the wholesale, retail and international trade sector with the status of a recognised EU level social partner. Back in 2002 EuroCommerce and UNI Europa (EuroCommerce's trade union counterpart) had drawn up a joint agreement on age diversity in commerce. The agreement included a set of voluntary guidelines to take up the challenge of allowing older workers to remain longer on the labour market while at the same time promoting job opportunities for younger people. In 2011, as part of the multi-stakeholder coalition for the EY2012, EuroCommerce supported the adoption of the "Manifesto for an Age-Friendly European Union by 2020". Ms Savoini finally listed a series of examples of good practice implemented in the commerce sector in order to keep older workers at work. Later in the year EuroCommerce would be publishing a compendium of this good practice. Mr Henry Lourdelle, Adviser (ETUC), in a preliminary remark questioned the relevance of very long forecasts (e.g. 50 years) and stressed that rather than talking about demographic dependency the focus should be on economic dependency. He also said that declaring that people should work more would not help much if employment was not available. It was furthermore a fact that when employment went down those who suffered were primarily young people, older people, women, the disabled, in one word the most fragile groups. He proposed five ideas: public authorities' responsibility (make it difficult to lay people off), life long learning (the better people were trained the easier it was to stay on the labour market), the introduction of flexible retirement schemes, the particular situation of women (notably the lack of appropriate care structures), and the need to adopt branch specific (or even company specific) measures rather than one-size-fits-all measures for the whole economy. These five ideas would be further developed at a conference to be hosted by ETUC with the support of the European Commission in October in Cyprus, with the aim of establishing a trade union action plan. Mr Wolfgang Greif, EESC member, stressed that the EESC had already expressed its view on the theme of the conference in previous work. For instance, the EESC opinion on "Demographic trends and the labour market", dating from July 2011, provided a comprehensive strategy for dealing with demographic change in an economically and socially responsible fashion. The key challenge was to see how the labour market could be organised in such a way that more people could be drawn into the labour market. The July 2011 opinion looked at what could be done in order to give more people access to the labour market. For senior workers it was important to remember that if the wish was that people should work longer it should be made sure that they could work longer (first that there were jobs available, and second that the working conditions of these jobs were suited to senior workers). This was an area where responsibility was shared between individuals, companies and public authorities. It was also important that the social partners were "on board". Without them it wouldn't work. Session 2: Humanising working conditions for senior workers Mr Tom Vandenbranden, researcher at the HIVA - Research Institute for Work and Society at Leuven University, presented the results of a study on job sustainability based on seven job quality types 1) "saturated jobs" (legislators, senior officials, managers); 2) "full-time balanced work" (professionals, office workers); 3) "work with limited career prospects" (mainly elementary occupations); 4) "work on flexible and unusual hours" (mainly machine operators and assembly workers); 5) "emotionally demanding work" (professionals); 6) "heavy repetitive work" (craft workers); and 7) "indecent work" (service and trade workers, elementary occupations). This study had

4 4 enabled a hierarchy to be drawn up where job sustainability decreased from 1) to 7). He showed in particular that "full-time balanced work" outperformed "emotionally demanding work" on almost all job quality outcomes and that far more "full-time balanced" workers felt they would be able to do their job until the age of 60. He concluded therefore that job quality and attractiveness should be important elements in active ageing policies. Mr Paul Berckmans, Director of StIA - Foundation for Innovation & Work, SERV Social and Economic Council of Flanders, explained that his foundation had carried out studies on workability based on four indicators: 1) well-being at work; 2) learning opportunities; 3) work-family balance and 4) stress at work. It had been observed that the rate of positive answers to the question as to whether workers felt able to reach the pension age in their current job diminished in proportion to their negative answers to those four indicators. A comparison of responses from the -50 and 50+ age group clusters showed the following differences: The -50 cluster complained more about a high workload and stress, whereas the 50+ cluster considered the lack of support from management more problematic. When looking at the feasibility of working until pension age, respondents aged under 50 scored 65.3% compared with 76.8% in the 50+ group, but the first also said that this tendency could change if better conditions were put in place. When comparing the and 55+ clusters, the first group scored worse on the four indicators. As regards the feasibility of working until pension age, the 55+ group reached 82.7% while the under 50s remained at To reverse this trend, the foundation suggested a careerpolicy agreement focussing on the 50+ group and on actions for increasing workability differentiated per sector. It had also launched the campaign "The right chair", which was based on a website with tips and tools promoting work after 50, while respecting workers' knowledge and skills. Mr Ralf Thomas, head of Volkswagen's Human Resources Department and responsible for the "Volkswagen pro Ehrenamt" (Volkswagen for Volunteering) initiative, presented an innovative Volkswagen project as a way of taking responsibility for both employees and society by promoting voluntary activities. This in-house service provided an interface between Volkswagen employees (who were about to leave or had left working life and wanted to engage in a meaningful activity) and different VW services or outside organisations who gave them the opportunity to do so on a voluntary basis. Activities tended to be assisting with expertise in particular Volkswagen production units both in Germany and abroad, which included transferring VW-specific know-how, sharing experience, training professionals and executives, mentoring junior staff, etc. On the other hand, a vast VW database of possible voluntary activities for the community proposed activities such as coaching in sports clubs, organising events, giving language courses for children with an immigrant background, assisting in youth camps, etc. This promotion of volunteering among experts created a win-win situation for Volkswagen and its employees it created value by recognising value. Mr Bjorn Cuyt, Adviser on Labour Market Policies and Social Affairs, UNIZO Employers' Organisation for SMEs and the self-employed, presented a study by the HIVA Institute of Leuven University showing that SMEs numbered a high percentage of older workers (more than 80%) because these represented an advantage for employers (know-how, experience, loyalty). Less positive aspects were the fact that training was often considered less useful for older workers and that early retirement could never be fully ruled out. He then presented two examples of good practice: a bakery and a small supermarket, where older workers were employed "because of necessity, service orientation, product knowledge, the right attitude and stability". A third example of good practice was where a garage had

5 5 put together a mix of older and younger employees to promote the sharing of proven methods with the young and the exchange of new knowledge with the old. They had also progressed from the mere retention of older workers to their active recruitment. In spite of difficulties, such as a certain clash between generations and the resistance of older workers to training, the benefits of having older workers were obvious in terms of experience and good attitude. Mr Chris Ball, Chief Executive of TAEN The Age and Employment Network, an independent charity supported by Age UK, explained the many reasons for wanting to work beyond the statutory pension age (financial reasons, feeling valued, fear of loneliness, fear of the health impact of giving up, etc.) and noted that in the UK this was more often the case for women because of poor pension provision. In general, attitudes about working longer needed to change, including improving the workability of older workers and adapting jobs to them. Making working later possible required work to be worthwhile, decent and healthy, learning and development opportunities, work-life balance, job progression and adaptation throughout the working life, and a labour market free of age discrimination. Flexible working possibilities included working part-time, taking longer holidays or regular sabbaticals, sharing jobs, etc., but flexibility could also apply to retirement, through partial retirement (combining reduced hours of work with a pension) or phased retirement (a "retire and come back" scheme). He also mentioned the case of workers with disabilities and their particular need for support. Possible solutions for increasing the statutory pension age needed to be discussed in detail at national and European level.