Axing older workers won’t save young people from the Covid dole queue | Dorothy Byrne | The Guardian

Calls for those in their late 50s to retire are misjudged. Plunging millions more into pension poverty won’t ‘free up’ jobs• Dorothy Byrne is editor-at-large at Channel 4The fallout from Covid-19 has inevitably increased calls for older workers like myself (I’m 68) to make way for young ones. A third of UK firms announced this week that they plan to cut jobs in the autumn and unemployment figures are up significantly.Pushing us out of the labour market feels like a simple solution. In a recent edition of his podcast Ways to Change the World, Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra: “If you could fix it, if you could change the world, what would you do?” Mishra replied: “I very strongly believe that true change will begin to happen when people from an older generation start to take voluntary retirement.” Continue reading…

Calls for those in their late 50s to retire are misjudged. Plunging millions more into pension poverty won’t ‘free up’ jobs

• Dorothy Byrne is editor-at-large at Channel 4

The fallout from Covid-19 has inevitably increased calls for older workers like myself (I’m 68) to make way for young ones. A third of UK firms announced this week that they plan to cut jobs in the autumn and unemployment figures are up significantly.

Pushing us out of the labour market feels like a simple solution. In a recent edition of his podcast Ways to Change the World, Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra: “If you could fix it, if you could change the world, what would you do?” Mishra replied: “I very strongly believe that true change will begin to happen when people from an older generation start to take voluntary retirement.”

Continue reading…