Recently I devised and conducted personal interviews with Mature Age Workers and Job seekers, contributing their voice to the Age Discrimination Commissioner, The Hon Susan Ryan AO’s,  ‘Willing to Work Inquiry’. Mostly they wanted to be heard, their experiences of discrimination used to inspire campaigns for change in employer attitudes and values towards older workers and the reform required to reclaim their equality of opportunity in Australian workplaces.

Optimise, downsize and generationally divide

Resilience and adaptability are the aspirational attributes of the ‘ideal employee’ in newly optimized and downsized workplaces. Management prefers more energetic, competitive, ambitious and flexible operators within the uncertain and changing work environments of our free market world. Individuals who meet these management perceptions become the victors of internal competition for diminishing roles in the workplace.

Older workers, people over 45, find themselves framed by management assumptions as less energetic, less adaptable learners and diminishing in their competence and employability. Seemingly organic and humanistic terms describe the ideal employee in terms of organisational instrumentality and enable communications which frame older workers in terms of deficit.

Ageism is a system of stereotypes, policies, norms, and behaviours that discriminate against, restrict, and dehumanize people because of their age. Like all such ‘isms’, it is ‘normalised’ and spreads through communication and practice. In workplaces, people who adopt a view or treat a person or group of people, as intrinsically different or as less desirable employees are practising discrimination.

Communications that assume… making crises invisible

Prejudice in workplace recruitment and retention practices is not always overt – it’s rendered invisible by the everyday assumptions created in accepted workplace discourse and reinforced and spread by economists, demographers, and politicians through communications in various media.

Internally, these ageist stereotypes impact a mature age workers’ ability to access training and promotion, and secure employment arrangements. Less able to access career opportunities or flexible workplace arrangements as they age and, they can become marginalised and experience bullying and harassment due to perceptions of their undesirability as employees. They are positioned as targets for redundancy during restructuring processes. Uncertainty, financial and domestic insecurity…and, of course, extreme pervasive anxiety were common themes amongst my interviewees. In a close-knit town older workers fear of openly discussing the issue lest their former employers further prejudice their job seeking efforts, both exacerbates the problem and enables the discriminatory practises.

Communication which engineers internal competition

Generationally-based marketing segments, created as perceptual lenses for marketing assist with targeting product development, communications and sales. Founded on broad assumptions and readily used to categorise people and ‘predict’ their behaviour – who likes and uses what – they’ve become accepted as ‘the way people of different ages are’. In work environments with diminishing resources and roles, these perceptions encourage negative competition between generational ‘cohorts’, pitting them against each other in the job market. The belief is that a cohesive, shared group identity generates enduring employability traits and work patterns in each cohort. ‘Seniors’ or ‘Maturists’ are readily perceived as conservative rule-abiders, loyal to employers, ‘Baby Boomers’ as competitive advocates, X Gen as authority sceptics seeking something better, and Y Gen as tech –savvy, self-seeking individualists but with lower attention spans.

Suggesting that Baby Boomers have had a ‘good run’ but are ‘denying job opportunities to young’ perpetuates assumptions that retirement around the age of that generation is inevitable and that y their employability diminishes on this basis alone. Responses to the Intergenerational Report based on such assumptions echo this intergenerational divisiveness-‘it ‘focuses on the old, when the ‘future belongs to the young’, and that ‘If you think about the younger people’s perspective, they think that older folks are taking their jobs.’

Polarise the debate…create economic saviours and burdens

By pitching those born in the 2003 ‘boom’ as the ‘Thank God You are Here’ (TGYH) generation, the ‘replacement generation’ for retiring Baby Boomers –they are positioned as demographic ‘rebalancers’ and ‘economic saviours of Australia’. And so the discourses of the free market frame older workers within a problem of ‘demographic imbalance’, enforcing and normalising expectations that they downsize into ‘second careers’ to stave off their own future destitution. Remaining as ‘economic contributors’, less they become ‘economically burdensome’ on young working people. Human Resource management discourse, shifts the blame onto insecure mature age workers and job seekers as those who took inadequate responsibility for their career planning and inevitable retirement. Ageism becomes institutionalised by the beliefs, communications and recruitment practices of organisations.

Gaining ‘buy-in’ to myths

The overt rhetoric is of the workplace meritocracy-the notion of workplaces as politically neutral, ungendered, non-discriminatory ‘level playing fields’ where individuals can achieve their vocational and career aspirations on the basis of merit enabled by policy and codes of practice. Acculturated to this myth, we assume that opportunity is distributed equally amongst people in workplaces – we also ‘buy-in’ to notions of competitive individualism and free-market determined opportunity.

Paternalism positions mature age workers

Older employees can settle for lower pay or less work, some employers prefer them as front office ‘greeters’, aged carers or retail shelf stackers. Retirement ‘frees’ them to ‘give back’ as volunteer workers or unpaid family carers whilst making room for younger people in their workplace. Downsizing their lives and expectations for the future, grateful and ‘willing’ workers, may be employed by benevolent corporations with favourable mature worker employment policies.

Older people, otherwise willing to work, have their skills and experience underutilised at a cost of $ 10.8 AUD Billion dollars annually. Despite their proven economic value to Australia, the reality is that they experience longer periods of time under or unemployed. The average of 94 weeks spent regaining employment is twice that of younger people (Australian Bureau of Statistics). And yes, youth unemployment is also high – around 15 %.Employment practices which prefer the younger worker don’t resolve the issue that many workplaces lack the capacity to employ diversity and inclusively on the basis of merit.

Competing discourses render invisible crises in workplaces and employment

Downsized and optimised workplaces diminish available employment. If corporate profit is prioritised over job creation, there are fewer roles and greater competition. In contradiction to the same economic rationalist discourse which promotes downsizing workplaces and removal of ‘less desirable’, mature workers, is that which promotes the cause and effect relationship between post-war ‘Baby-Boom’-induced demographic ‘imbalance’ and future economic crisis, whereby older worker retention as economic contributors is critical. Demoralised older unemployed people may be less likely to cause visible crisis in dissent than those younger, particularly when considered ‘burdensome’ and baring the blame for the careers it is assumed they mismanaged. At the same time the preferred recruitment of younger people is legitimised by economic discourses which promote them as Australia’s future economic heroes.

Reclaiming discourses of inclusion

It makes you wonder whether in 2048, when TGYH turn 45, will workplaces remain fragmented by generational cohorts lacking the integrative and inclusive cultures promoted by non-discriminatory thinking, communications and practices which respect and accommodate the employability of ageing workers.

Attitudes towards workers of all ages are determined by what we think and assume, how we then see them, communicate with and act towards them. Advocates of inclusion must readily decode the language and discourses which reinforce age-based stereotypes and employment discrimination made ‘normal’ by organisational and social discourse, decision-makers and their useful experts and commentators, choosing instead, to identify, use and spread the language and discourses of inclusion.

Nicola Wright is a communications professional who works with projects, programs, and organisations who deliver social and environmental value. ADAPT Strategic Communications custom-builds communication strategies, find Nicola on www.adaptstrategic.com.au