B2B Markeplace

A recent report from a leading think tank has recommended that the age at which people are eligible for a pension be put up to over 70, with the aim of allowing the government to maintain the costs of pensions at the level they were in 1990. This has worried many people, because it may mean that many people will have to give up the thought of ever being able to retire and may have to carry on working until they breath their last. However we should bear in mind a further issue: what type of employment is likely to be available to older people? There is a worrying degree of discrimination against older people in the employment market, and many older people may not be able to either get a job or qualify for a pension. The solution for many may possibly lie in the field of Internet business, where it is possible to work from home in a wide choice of online jobs.

Recruiters usually tend to prefer young employees, although they also seem to ask for a long period of previous experience. One person visiting an employment agency was informed they were ‘over the hill’ at 35. Discrimination on the basis of age is officially unlawful, but the difficulty lies in proving when it has occurred.

Despite this, people are living a great deal longer now than before. Granted that everyone believes it is a good thing to extend lifespans as much as we can, nobody seems to appreciate the repercussions in terms of a lot more money needed for paying people in their old age. A second question is that birth rates are below the replacement rate, meaning that there will be fewer people in work financing the pensions of a significantly enlarged number of old age pensioners.

Not everyone realises that the NI contributions paid by working people today are employed to pay directly for today’s pensions. It is no more than an ‘IOU’ note for others, and many are concerned that when today’s younger or middle aged people turn 65, the state won’t have the resources to meet pension obligations.

A major charity has indicated that the number of unemployed people over 50 who have remained unemployed for over a year, has increased by 52% in the last year, due to the more severe effect that the downturn has had on the over 50s. Three-quarters of the older longer term jobless are men, which tells us that older females may have more success in getting part-time or temporary jobs. The problem is likely to be made worse by the addition of hundreds of thousands of older people now classified as able to work as they are no longer considered disabled, as part of the government’s drive to cut spending.

So what advantage can online jobs in Internet business bring to this question? To begin with, it is unquestionably a field where ‘silver surfers’ can make as much of a contribution as the younger generation, and their enhanced life knowledge could be extremely beneficial. In addition, they let people work from home, so those who do have disabilities or mobility problems can nevertheless work without a problem in these posts.

Discrimination against older workers could be partly a question of individual perception. If you meet a person and think they are over the hill, then that individual is unlikely to get a position. In Internet business you do not see the individual you are dealing with, hence their age is unknown to you, so a judgement is not so rashly formed based on such information.

In the face of rising pension ages and the unemployment crisis, the issue of jobs for older people is unlikely to be resolved overnight. Opportunities to work from home in the online jobs generated by Internet business may not eliminate unemployment entirely, however they are a serious alternative for a lot of of the older generation.