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Age Integration in Europe

Increasing or Decreasing?

^a Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Paris V, Sorbonne, France

Correspondence: Anne-Marie Guillemard, PhD, Ministere de l'Education Nationale, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.

I am grateful to John and Matilda Riley for inviting me to take part in this panel on Age Integration which is, in my opinion, a very burning issue. I am interested in whether we are moving toward more age integration or toward more age discrimination. Are we entering a society for all ages, where age is no longer used as a basis for barriers and discrimination among people? Or is the future of society going to bring war between age groups? My response to this question is based on my current research activity which deals with employment throughout the life course. My focus is on the way in which European societies deal with this issue: how they distribute work and nonwork across age strata and across the life course.

I have to answer "both" to my earlier question on whether the trend is toward more age integration or discrimination. I see European societies as being schizophrenic regarding age integration—they are developing contradictory behaviors within differing contexts of employment or social welfare.

1. When European societies contemplate employment, they view age discrimination as the only solution to the problem of high unemployment. Substituting younger people for aging wage earners at the workplace is the new norm in employment. Early labor force exit and negative discrimination against aging workers in employment has become a common feature of European labor markets. Thus workers, even in their forties, may be deemed too old to be promoted or to be retrained. They are seen as wage earners without any future at the workplace, although their life expectancy continues to increase and roughly half of their life course still lies ahead of them.
   
2. But there is a paradox here, because age discrimination in employment tends to break down earlier chronological markers and age barriers. As a result, distinctions between ages become blurred; the life course is less predictable and more uncertain. Moreover, there is a poor fit between individual expectations and structural opportunities. Some aging workers complain about the few structural opportunities that remain for them to maintain their social usefulness. In response, more and more of them engage in nonprofit activities in many places throughout Europe. Most of these nonprofit activities involve intergenerational relations cutting across age barriers. This means that these aging workers are denying the relevance of age barriers and age segregation in their daily lives.
   
3. When European societies contemplate social expenditures within the welfare state, particularly for retirement pensions, they would like to postpone the retirement age. Therefore, in an effort to rebalance the financial equilibrium of pensions, all pension reforms implemented in Europe have tried to increase the length of the work life and postpone retirement age. For example, the expansion of flexible retirement (in the case of the British project of "a retirement decade") may be seen as an attempt to delay the exit from the labor market for aging wage earners. The mushrooming of flexible or gradual retirement schemes all over Europe is another example of efforts to retain aging workers in the labor market, even as part-time workers.
   
4. Meanwhile, one can observe a few new developments in age-integrated structures. Transitions from education to work as well as from work to retirement are becoming increasingly unclear. A new flexible and destandardized life course is appearing as chronological age loses ground as a marker. Some new public employment policies implemented in Europe tend in this direction and address all ages.
   

A good example is training programs for all ages. For a long time, continuing education programs targetted wage earners under 40 years old. Now, a special effort has been made to include aging wage earners beyond their forties and to stop age discrimination in training altogether.

In France, an employment policy implemented in 1994 aims at increasing work flexibility and reducing the time that wage-earners of all ages spend working.

The "Time Savings Account" is a major innovation. Through agreements worked out inside firms, it provides for turning the right to paid leaves of absence into a type of capital for employees, regardless of age. It has three objectives. It satisfies an employee demand for being able to save such leaves so that, during certain periods, the time thus saved can serve to finance long absences for sabbaticals, parental leave, etc. It can also serve to distribute productivity gains in the form of remunerated free time. Furthermore, it enables firms to manage leaves taken at the end of careers by employees nearing retirement. Under this scheme, employees are paid, as a function of their wages, for leaves at least six months long. This new "Time Savings Account" has inspired a recent report for the European Commission: A. Supiot's Au-delà de l'emploi. Transformations du travail et devenir du droit du travail en Europe (Supiot 1999). To cope with the evolving labor market and the new flexible life course as it emerges, this report proposes developing more pliant welfare arrangements around the principle of "drawing social entitlements." Such entitlements tend to be age-neutral and cut across the bounds of the threefold organization of the life-course. They would generalize the Time Savings Account principle to all welfare programs, thus enabling a new, voluntary and flexible, distribution of paid periods of work and of nonwork over the life-course. Time would no longer be distributed owing to one's age-group or position in the life-course, but access to these entitlements would be open to all ages. Time would no longer be remunerated by specific programs depending on whether it was spent on a leave of absence for raising children (parental leave), furthering one's education or training, or taking early retirement or gradual retirement. A single welfare policy would meet all these needs in a society where age would become irrelevant as the central criterion for allocating "social rights" and welfare benefits.

	References

TOP References

 

• Supiot A., 1999[Beyond employment. Conversations of work and work reform in Europe]. Au-delà de l'emploi. Transformations du travail et devenir du droit du travail en Europe Flammarion, Paris.

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