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125 Int'l Lab. Rev. 329 (1986)
Labour Flexibility and Older Worker Marginalisation: The Need for a New Strategy

handle is hein.journals/intlr125 and id is 343 raw text is: International Labour Review, Vol. 125, No. 3, May-June 1986 Labour flexibility and older worker marginalisation: The need for a new strategy Guy STANDING * A man's years should not be counted, until he has nothing else to count. R. W. Emerson I. Introduction In Western Europe mass unemployment has hit some groups particu- larly hard. Much attention has been devoted to teenagers whose efforts to enter the employed labour force have been frustrated by the limited availability of new jobs. Far less attention has been paid to workers in their fifties and sixties who have been those most affected by the job-shedding that has gone on since the mid-1970s. One difficulty is that their plight is concealed by the statistics typically used as indicators of labour market performance. This article considers the extent of labour underutilisation among older workers, reviews the factors that have influenced their absolute and relative vulnerability, and argues that changes in patterns of labour use and the chronic labour surplus require new forms of income support if older workers are not to be marginalised and, in many cases, pushed into premature poverty. II. The employment of older workers in Western Europe The measured unemployment rate is not the best indicator of older workers' labour market position. Many older workers withdraw from the labour market if unemployed, either in discouragement or into early retirement, and, as argued later, these tendencies have been accentuated with the lowering of the normal retirement age and as a result of policy shifts. Those shifts have been dramatic. In the 1950s and 1960s the emphasis in the tight labour markets of industrialised countries, including the United States and Western Europe, was on keeping older workers in the labour * International Labour Office. Copyright © International Labour Organisation 1986 32-9

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