Thoughts on Employer Reactions to the Elimination of Mandatory Retirement

This is old news, but I got to thinking about it as I was clearing out my home office and came across an article in the Fall 2008 issue of Industrial Relations by Andrew Templar and Marjorie Armstrong-Stassen from the Odette School of Business at the University of Windsor.  I've been a member of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association for some years now, an Industrial Relations is the publication that you receive as a member (among other benefits).  The article is entitled The HR Management Perspective on the Elimination of Mandatory Retirement in Ontario.

There had been little research on what HR was doing, if anything, to deal with this and the study tries to explore this.  As a generalization, the authors state that:"

"In general, organizations with and without a fixed retirement policy in place are doing relatively little in developing HR policies and procedures to recruit and actively retain older workers.  While disappointing, this is not out of line with other research findings pointing to a general lack of pro-active HR practices directed towards older workers."

Furthermore:

"Despite the limited number of significant differences, our results do support the notion that human capital assumptions may be at work.  Thus, it does appear that HR managers in organizations which practice mandatory retirement may hold a depreciation view of their employees' contributions [employees lose value as they age] and feel there is little value-added for engaging in HR practices directed at older workers because such employees will be leaving anyway."

For whatever reason, most employers (another sweeping generalization) do not seem to be actively engaging in the development or implementation of policies that are aimed at recruiting or retaining older workers.  

Fast forward, and we now find ourselves in the worst recession in memory.  Pension plans and investments are getting hammered.  I suspect that many employees will, from necessity if for no other reason, forego retiring if that was in the cards, in favour of continued employment. Employers that have not responded to the reality of an aging workforce in the context of the elimination of mandatory retirement on the expectation that "such employees may be leaving anyway" might want to revisit that assumption in light of the current economic circumstances.