The ageism debate

India will gain from raising the retirement age

Whether it is ageism or reverse ageism, India has an age problem in the workplace. A new study by recruitment agency Randstad, which surveyed nearly 1,000 respondents, has revealed that 40 per cent of employees had either experienced or witnessed age-related discrimination in the workplace. Overall 42 per cent of employees below 55 experienced or witnessed age-related discrimination against 29 per cent for those over 55. A little over half the employees in the survey said they felt valued versus 63 per cent for those over 55. This asymmetry extends to perceptions of compensation, with 32 per cent of those under 35 saying they did not feel valued or adequately compensated. These biases creep into job advertisements, with 61 per cent of the respondents reporting qualifying criteria specifying age or years of experience, with multinationals leading from the front on this metric. Age-related discrimination is enhanced by other forms of biases; for example, 42 per cent of women reported experience of or witnessing such discrimination against 37 per cent for men.

At one level, the relatively high prevalence of reverse ageism in the workplace is unsurprising, given India’s youthful demographics, with more than 65 per cent of the population below 35 years and traditional societal instincts to equate age with wisdom and ability. But in the broader scheme of things, qualified young people of the kind that participate in this survey, can, in the fullness of time, acquire the necessary experience to overcome the problem of reverse ageism. The concerns perhaps should focus on the growing ageism creeping into organisations. Two interrelated facts will impact the workplace within the next generation. The first is that, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPF), the decadal growth rate of elderly people will rise sharply from 35.5 per cent in 2011-21 to 41 per cent in 2021-31 and the percentage of elderly people in the population will double to over 20 per cent. By 2046, the UNPF projects, the elderly population will have surpassed the population of children (aged 15 years and below).

This projection of an unexpectedly and rapidly ageing population with a growing life expectancy, when juxtaposed with the fact that India has one of the lowest retirement ages  globally, suggests the country will soon have a fast-expanding cohort of elderly retirees dependent on savings. In India, the retirement age is between 58 and 60 for corporations and government servants with an upper limit of 70 for whole-time directors and 75 for non-executive directors. Advanced countries such as Iceland, Australia, Spain, and Italy have set the retirement age at 66-67. In France, where workers like to retire in their fifties, proposals to raise the pension age from 62 to 64 met with fierce protests. Singapore recently raised the retirement age from 63 to 64 and the re-employment age from 68 to 69. Most of these countries are adjusting for rapidly ageing populations and growing age dependency of the populations. In India, on the other hand, with youth unemployment high and skilled youth increasingly coming at a premium, workplaces would benefit from moving early to adopt the seemingly contrarian policy of raising the retirement age early and maximising the gains from the experience of older workers.