Managing the Older Worker

4

Confronting Ageism

As we saw earlier, older people want to work. Employers generally have positive things to say about their own older workers and see them as a source of advantage for their business. The evidence in chapter 2 shows definitively that they perform better on virtually every relevant measure of performance, and cost differences are at best trivial. And as we saw in chapter 3, keeping older workers engaged longer, even if in different arrangements, is a necessary part of the solution to retaining knowledge; and hiring new ones offers the just-in-time workforce that employers say they need. Given this overwhelming business case, ...