Tag Archives: Iou Note

Finding Employment Options For The Over Fifties, As The Age For Retirement Keeps On Going Up

Recently newspapers reported the findings of the Pensions Policy Institute that the normal retirement age be put up to 72, in order to allow the state to maintain the costs of pensions at the level they were in 1990. This has worried many people, since it could signify that a large part of the population must forget the idea of ever getting a pension and may need to carry on working until they die. However there is another aspect to this: what type of work is going to be open to people over 50? There is a worrying amount of age discrimination by many companies, and a significant proportion of over 50s may be unable to either find a job or qualify for a pension. However there is a possible solution in the field of Internet business, where they can work from home in a wide choice of online jobs.

Employers overall tend to prefer more youthful employees, but they also seem to require a long period of previous experience. One person I heard of was told they were ‘long in the tooth’ although they were just 35. Discrimination against older people is officially against the law, but it is very difficult to prove when it has occurred.

Despite this, life expectancies are higher today than before. While everybody says it is desirable to extend life as much as medical science allows, on the other hand they do not consider the implications in terms of the need to put aside more money for pensions. A second question is that low birth rates mean that there aren’t going to be enough economically active people working and providing for the pensions of a significantly larger number of old people.

In fact, the National Insurance contributions collected today are used to pay directly for current pensions. It is no more than an ‘IOU’ note for people who are still working, and many fear that when today’s younger or middle aged people want to stop working, the government won’t have enough money to provide these people with their pensions.

Senior citizens’ charity Age UK has found that the number of unemployed people over 50 who have remained unemployed for over a year, has risen by over half in the last 12 months, as a direct result of the disproportionate impact of the downturn on older generations. Three-quarters of the unemployed over 50 are men, indicating that the women in this generation may be better at finding temporary or part-time positions. The position could be made more acute by the competition for jobs from three quarters of a million older people re-classified as able to work since their incapacity benefit has been removed, following the government’s cost-cutting drive.

So what solution can online jobs in Internet business bring to this predicament? Firstly, it is indisputably a line of work where ‘silver surfers’ can offer as great a contribution as more youthful workers, and their knowledge from their previous careers can be very helpful. Second, they let people work from home, so people who have health or disability issues could nevertheless work without a problem in these positions.

Discrimination against older workers may be to some extent a matter of personal perception. If you see somebody and think they are past it, then they are not likely to be offered the position. In Internet business you do not see the individual you are doing business with, and you cannot tell how old they are, so you don’t form a subjective opinion on the basis of what age they seem to be.

In view of raised retirement ages and the jobs shortage, the problem of work for the older generation will not be resolved overnight. Opportunities to work from home in the online jobs generated by Internet business may not resolve the problem completely, but they are a serious choice for a lot of older workers.

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