Would you apply for a job which requires you to be “dynamic” or a “digital native”? If you’re over 40, it might not be worth bothering. Until recently, it looked as though Generation X had never had it so good. But age discrimination is alive and well — and the exodus of older workers in the pandemic may be more of a Great Clear-Out than a Great Resignation. As the diversity and inclusion agenda spawns a million training courses and reports into race and gender, age remains taboo. Amazon has agreed to audit its racial diversity, under pressure from shareholders, following similar moves at Apple and JPMorgan. But discrimination against older workers rarely features. Even though Google and other companies have been successfully sued for it, a 2020 survey of global employers revealed that most do not include age in their diversity and inclusion policies.
This is not entirely surprising. After all, the over-50s have driven most of the growth in employment in the past decade, and have a greater share of assets than younger generations. Moreover, when there are so few workers that flights are being cancelled, the waiter at my local café looks about 12 and half the windows on my local high street display a “help wanted” sign, it seems straightforward for anyone, however doddery, to find work. But recently, I’ve met quite a few individuals who say they have given up looking for a job, so hard is it to find anything.
It has been assumed that the mass resignation of baby boomers in the pandemic was a choice, made by thrill-seeking oldsters who had saved enough money to kick the rat race. But what if employers used the pandemic to quietly shed older workers who cost more than younger ones? Analysis by the US Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis suggests that not all of the exodus was voluntary. Of the 1mn Americans aged between 55 and 74 who have left the job market since March 2020, according to Schwartz, about 400,000 were people who lost their job, and a year later still couldn’t find another one. In the UK, the number of 50 to 64-year-olds who are no longer looking for work has risen to 228,000, according to the Centre for Ageing Better, which says that over-50s were half as likely as younger workers to be re-employed during the pandemic.