Commentary: Where have all the older workers gone and will they come back? – CNA

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imageLONDON: Not that long ago I found myself at a lunch in the middle of London where a well known British business figure said something unexpected about the menace of rising inflation .

Any company with a board member who had been a senior executive for 30 years was doing pretty well right now, he said.

Why? Because that director would have dealt with high inflation before.“I was alive back then,” added the man, who was in his early 50s.“But I wasn’t running a company.”

I thought of his words last week as soaring energy and food costs drove inflation rates to a 30-year high in the United Kingdom and a 40-year one in the United States.

The advantages of experienced older workers, inside and out of the boardroom, have never seemed more obvious.

Yet these same people are in the throes of a sweeping disappearing act, vanishing from their desks at higher rates than their mid-career colleagues in workplaces around the world.

Nearly 70 per cent of the 5 million people who left work in the US during the pandemic were older than 55, researchers said in November 2021.In the UK, the employment rate of over-50s fell by twice that of those aged between 25 and 49 years in 2020.

Amid predictions of a great resignation wave, are expectations of workers unrealistic? Listen to CNA’s Heart of the Matter: This may be a welcome development for younger workers battling to make their way past a vast demographic wave of job-hogging baby boomers.

And there is no doubt that many older leavers are cheerfully heading off to retirement after a recession that, unlike the last big downturn in 2008 and 2009, left them with more valuable homes and fatter stock portfolios.

PANDEMIC REVERSED OLDER WORKFORCE TRENDS Yet, for workers and employers alike, the picture is far from uniformly rosy.The grey resignation amounts to the reversal of an important pre-COVID-19 trend towards older workforces.

In the US, the percentage of workers aged 55 or older rose from 13 per cent in 2000 to 24 per cent in 2019 and similar patterns have emerged elsewhere, which is precisely what a lot of governments wanted.

They lifted retirement ages to address fears that ageing populations would struggle to be supported by a shrinking share of younger workers, fuelling a rise in older staff that has been good news for employers in a country like the UK.Combined with other trends in migration and labour market deregulation, it made it relatively easy for them to hire the workers they needed.

Related: Commentary: Why hybrid work may feel more exhausting than working from the office or home Commentary: Here’s what the man who predicted Great Resignation thinks is coming next And since a lot of those workers were aware of how easily they could be replaced, they agreed to hours and working conditions that suited them less than their organisations.

They’re saying, “We’ve got a skills drain”, says Nick Gallimore, director of innovation at Advanced, a UK business software group.

He spends a lot of time talking to HR directors and says the loss of seasoned staff can hit a business hard.

The answer, he says, is for companies to think more about how to attract and retain such workers.One way to do this will not be news to any employer who has spent a minute listening to what staff want right now: A continuation of the autonomy many tasted during the pandemic.

Employees of all ages want more freedom at work.For some older ones, there may never have been a better time to achieve it.

Related: Commentary: Why is this inflation so hard to control? Commentary: Seniors do well at their jobs yet ageist myths and negative stereotypes persist.

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