Archive for category Commentary
Lifting the bar
Posted by Alison in Commentary on November 3rd, 2011
Yesterday the Assistant Treasurer Bill Shorten announced that the age bar for superannuation guarantee contributions would be lifted completely – updating the previous decision to raise to 75 years.
From July 2013, all employees regardless of age will receive the superannuation guarantee.
This decision has been welcomed by Susan Ryan, Age Discrimination Commissioner, who says:
It sends a strong and positive message to older employees and to their employers that age should be no barrier to equal employee rights.
This decision means that in respect of superannuation, older workers, be they over 75 or over 80, will have the same rights as all other employees.
One more move in the right direction for mature workers in Australia. Chip chip…
Susan Ryan, Age Discrimination Commissioner: Redrawing the picture
Posted by Alison in Commentary on October 19th, 2011
There is a buzz around the SageCo office as we eagerly anticipate the November launch of ENVISAGE – our new facilitated and online solution. ENVISAGE is an evolution of our popular Create program and takes a (very!) colourful and artistic view of retirement and planning in late career.
So with this in mind, Susan Ryan’s latest opinion piece strikes a chord as she speaks of ‘redrawing’ the mature age picture.
Recently appointed as Australia’s first dedicated Age Commissioner, Susan is already making her mark, recently putting forward a suite of proposals at the federal Government’s Tax Forum held in September. The objective? To remove negative tax impacts on older Australians.
Getting rid of age barriers in super, workers compensation and income insurance would produce more productivity. If, in the near future, we can provide successful examples, put in place by forward-looking employers, we would have inspirational models for the broader workforce.
Age caps currently leave workers over 65 uncovered for workers’ compensation and income maintenance insurance. Not conducive to the current trend of working longer and deferring retirement.
The changes put forward by The Commissioner will support employers keen to benefit from the skills, experience, knowledge and loyalty of the mature workforce.
(Published in The Equality Law Reform Project, 10 October 2011)
65 ain’t 65 anymore
Posted by Alison in Commentary, Media on September 29th, 2011
Just as 40 is the new 30, 65 ain’t 65 anymore
writes Greg Jericho in The Drum Opinion yesterday.
Last week the Daily Telegraph ran a front page story with the cheery headline “Graveyard Shift“, bemoaning that mature workers are being ‘forced’ to work longer. Not so, says Jericho. The facts support this counter argument, we are living longer healthier lives and mature workers have been steadily ‘working longer’ since 1983. A trend quite removed from the impact of the GFC and stock market fluctuations.
we should not be running front page stories about older people having to work, we should be running front page stories about what governments and employers are doing to encourage and help those over 65 to work
SageCo echoes these sentiments in an article published by Human Capital Online last week, sharing data gained from over 2500 mature workers in the past year on their future working intentions.
It comes down to individual choice (and of course ability) to continue working. For choice to occur, there need to be options available. For options to be available, organisations need to focus on reshaping the way we work and create space for the conversation.
81% stated they would continue to work, if they could work differently. The problem is that the conversation is not taking place, said Monroe
It is integral for leaders to be talking to the mature members of the team, and gauging their future work intentions, not their ‘retirement intentions’, which sends the wrong message to the older workforce.
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The big tilt tittering
Posted by Catriona in Commentary on November 14th, 2011
I lunched last Friday with 100 others or so at South Australia’s CEDA event ‘Population Crunch’. After seven or so years of quoting Bernard’s research, it was nice to chat with the man who coins media savvy terms like ‘man drought’. Bernard’s latest book ‘The Big Tilt’ is essentially about the crunch that occurs as we have more baby boomers leaving the workforce than Gen Ys entering it. Salt’s eloquent observations and generalisations provoked a bit of a titter in the room – many of them in the Baby Boomer demographic.
It’s not new news. But it does provide another perspective to consider the social impact of this phenomenon and what it means for the workplace and baby boomers in particular. Salt talked about the need to re-engineer the space that now exists between ‘traditional retirement’ and death – a period of what could be twenty to thirty years. With our workforce participation and workforce planning glasses on, it would seem in employers’ best interests to support baby boomers to ‘re-engineer that space’.
Baby boomers invented the concept of a ‘teenager’. I wonder in later life if they will invent a new name for that phase between traditional retirement and death. They may well do it with support from their employers.
baby boomers, retirement, the big tilt
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