It’s farcical that the Federal Government is considering flooding the jobs market with migrants when there are more than 100,000 older workers, over 45 years of age, looking for a job.
There are also about 400,000 people on the aged pension who want to work more.
Last year, a MAX Solutions study showed that 30 per cent of Australian employers won’t hire older workers, even though they are highly skilled.
People aged 55-64 were the largest unemployed group receiving social security payments during the pandemic.
Age prejudice condemns thousands of older workers and their families to a life of poverty and penury. It is an insane prejudice because one is born in a certain year.
MAX Solutions Fiona Lamb said 17.8 per cent of Australians are aged 50-64, yet they represented 28 per cent of MAX’s 116,899 unemployed customers in May 2021.
According to a MAX survey, more than half of employers said they found mature-age workers to be more skilled compared to their younger peers in dispute resolution (57 per cent), mediation (55 per cent) and managing others (55 per cent).
60 per cent of employers said other benefits included their “wealth of experience”, followed by “maturity and stability” (48 per cent) and “reliability and dependability” (43 per cent).’
Employers and the Federal Government have got to wake up and get older job seekers in to work.