Thursday, December 15, 2011

Have the UK's year old legislation against age discrimination worked at workplaces?

It is exactly a year since the new legislation in the U.K. against age discrimination in employment came into effect. Yet not one word has been said about it at either the Labour, Lib-Dem or the Conservative Party conferences. How has it affected your workplace? Has it worked better or worse than previous legislation against discrimination on grounds of race or religion and discrimination on grounds of gender, and basically do you agree or disagree with such legislation being on the statute book.|||No with a few exceptions it seems employers are successfully dodging it by tricks like just not bothering to answer any application for employment believed to be old. Likewise many refuse to answer applications from somebody thought to be of a race or religion they do not want or of a different gender but they never communicate with the applicant so they can not be called to account under the referred to legislation. However I have noted in my company a changed policy in not sacking older workers over 65 so readily as they used to now they can be taken to an unfair dismissals tribunal by workers over 65, which could not be done before the legislation came in. Racial descrimination is certainly going on too. For example I know for a fact that in the hospitality business most employers will not recruit anybody of presumed British nationality as nowadays for such jobs as "Hotel porter" they only want applicants from abroad like Polish or Estonian so that legislastion is not working either?





Interesting you mention that none of the Party Conferences want to commit themselves on this because they are all after the youth vote. We should bear in mind that the employment legislation you refer to did not emanate from any desire in the Labour government to end age discrimination in employment but because of a European Union Directive which if the truth be known all our politicians did not like. The huge flaw in the legislation that came in a year ago is that it did not ban a compulsory retiring age, and I personally considef it outrageous that the age a person retires from work should still be determined entirely by their date of birth, irrespective as to their ability or otherwise to do the job, their physical and mental health and their qualifications and experiencew, so yes this sort of legislation should be supported..|||It has not affected our work place in the slightest. I do agree that people should not be discriminated against, so agree that this is on the statue book.





There have been many examples of times when people are fired, age being a factor, as well as the problem with older people who are out of a job finding it hard to find employment of the sort they are trained to do.

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