Equalities Act

The Equalities Act comes into force today. It's designed to draw together all the anti-discrimination laws with a view to simplifying and standardising the law and making them all easier to understand, that's the theory.

The Act continues to allow employers to have a default retirement age of 65 until April 2011 and then it will be phased out by October 2011. This means that employers really need to gear up their performance management processes and think long and hard about supporting older workers in making life:work decisions in their older years. This will be particularly important for organisations with an older age profile as it could help them with workforce planning.

The reality is most people will make decisions on when their pension is available, if they are lucky to have one. This may mean many will want to keep some form of work until annuity rates improve.

Another interesting aspect of the Equalities Act which could help older workers is that it is now unlawful to face invasive questioning about health and disability before a job offer stage in recruitment (unless intrinsically necessary for the role), IE effectively the end of the pre-employment health questionnaires.

Also, in terms of the provision of goods and services, the new Act protects consumers from age discrimination by making it unlawful to offer less favourable treatment on grounds of age without justification. Lots of exceptions too.

There's some pretty straight forward information summarising this all from the ACAS website

Bridging the World

The growing 50+ market is huge and still hugely under served. It is therefore interesting to note that STA, the Student Travel Agency, has recognised this is a potentially lucrative market segment and has launched a new travel agency called Bridge The World (see www.bridgetheworld.com). The spokesmen state that these are the people who are likely to have the time to travel because they are fully or partially retired. Another critical factor to their success has to be the fact that the 50+ are also more likely to have the money to enjoy long haul travel as the initial focus is on Australia, New Zealand, Asia and South Pacific.

It will be interesting to see how this business progresses. An initial observation is that the travel insurance only covers individuals up to the age of 70, which seems quite young and limiting. The other key aspect is what impact concerns about the environment will have on potential customers.

At least it is an example of a Business finally taking the older market more seriously.

Good news for Grey Hair

In the book called "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (page 63) he states, and I quote:
" I was amused to discover an evolutionary argument in mate selection that considers that women prefer (on balance) to mate with healthy older men over healthy younger ones, everything else being equal, as the former provide some evidence of better genes. Gray hair signals an enhanced ability to survive- conditional on having reached the gray hair stage, a man is likely to be more resistant to the vagaries of life. Curiously life insurers in renaissance Italy reached the same conclusion by charging the same insurance for a man in his twenties as they did for a man in his fifties...once a man crossed the forty five year old mark, he had shown very few ailments could harm him".

Maybe this could present a new marketing opportunity for manufacturers of grey hair dyes to expand their market to younger men!