Conclusion – Policy Priorities from EXTEND

Zusammenfassung

Over the past 50 years, across Europe, older workers have been commonly regarded as a reserve army of labour: to be jettisoned from employment when the supply of labour is plentiful or when fears about the adverse social consequences of youth unemployment are running high; and, alternatively, to be encouraged or forced to remain in employment when labour is scarcer and the costs of pensions and pre-retirement benefits are regarded as ‘too high’. The latter scenario reflects the latest and current policy perspective towards older workers, and the classic supply and demand for labour logic is overwhelmed by the neoliberal ideology that now underpins, to varying extents, policy making in Europe. The present strong and virtually universal focus on both closing early exit pathways and raising pension ages, which is the dominant policy fix for the perceived fiscal crisis created by population ageing, began in the late 1990s with the abandonment of measures, such as pre-retirement, which paradoxically encouraged older workers to leave employment prematurely (Walker 1997).