Active ageing and the European labour market: Synthesis report

This study considers active ageing policies in labour market in ten European countries. The study aims to identify changes to European labour markets in the past 15 years and assess what these changes mean for active ageing policy agendas (i.e. identify barriers and opportunities). In Active Ageing programmes the concepts and aims can be European but the national institutions of each welfare state should appropriate its own programme of social learning. The reason is the clear differences shown to prevail both in the labour markets and in the pace of ageing in individual European countries. However, ageing is more rapid in public sector in all countries. For example in Finland, in government sector in 10 years 75% of leaders and 50% of employees retire. It is argued that one of the main barriers to the employment of older people is inaccurate perceptions about the capabilities of older workers such as long professional experience and the atmosphere of reliability and loyalty to employers. However, one cannot isolate issues pertaining to older workers. Age management is bound to general wellbeing at work places. Successful active ageing policy could also be part of innovative human resource management. An increasing number of firms are adopting new human resource management that has large impact on employeremployee work relations. Many of the positive characteristics of older workers relate to a longer work relationship and particularly the recruitment of new older workers is difficult and should be subsidised. Finally, new senior citizenship should be introduced that also covers retired. This is particularly important when active ageing policies are prone to be conducted by labour market participants (unions and employer federations) that are likely to ignore issues relevant for the retired.