Stupid question re raising of retirement age

[flyingcloud]

I live in France and was seriously bothered by last year's protests against the raising of retirement age here. It seemed so ridiculous to complain as it was only a minimal rise.

However I have a friend in England who manages a business with a large number of employees doing physical/manual labour and that friend is seriously worried about the proposed rise in the retirement age.

Can someone explain to me how that works? No business could survive making that many employees redundant. But how do you protect your business without discriminating against older people?

Sorry, not sure what you mean - are you saying that if your friend's employees aren't made to retire at 60 or 65, they will all stay on and the company will end up with mostly older workforce?

If the work is heavy and manual then the business would have to look at reassigning older workers to more ability-appropriate jobs over time or there would need to be some arrangement for 'retirement due to ill health'. Quite likely a company like that would start to employ people on fixed contracts rather than make them permanent staff. I don't think there's a big difference between 65 and 68 health-wise but when you get into the realms of someone being able to stay on voluntarily past 68 it would have to be at the employers' discretion.

Thanks for replying.

There are no other ability appropriate jobs, other than a handful of admin roles.

TBH I am not quite sure why she is worrying as the more I think about it the more ways around it there seems to be.

Then if no reasonable adjustments could be made and the person was not able to do the job required they would be sacked under capability. A no blame dismissal.

It will lead to more tribunals as an employer would have to use capability as a factor for letting somebody go and not rely on the retirement age. However, many 60+ year olds have less sick days than younger people.

Emoloyers will have no discretion for employees staying on past 68 unless they could prove that they are not capable of doing the job. Up until April people over the age of 65 people have to ask for permission to stay on.

Betelgeuse

"ITER will be built in France!!! no other place had the infrastructure and people to receive this advanced form of energy."

Yes, yes, of course...

The original two main candidates weren't Canada and Japan.

The French never offered to pay more than their share of the cost in order to host it.

There was never a drawn out negotiation over whether it should be in France or Japan.

It was never settled by the Japanese offering to pay less in return for getting more of the jobs.

None of that happened, if you think you read it you must have dreamed it. France was the only ever possible choice, "no other place" could ever possibly have had it.

"The fact is that ITER will be in France!"

I'm not disagreeing with that at all.

What I'm taking issue with is your claim that "no other place had the infrastructure and people to receive this advanced form of energy", which is clearly nonsense.

Other places could easily have hosted ITER, that France has it is because they had the financial backing of the EU and were willing to add even more of their own money directly.

And then they struck a deal with Japan over workers.

A more accurate statement would have been "no other place as willing to pay as much money to receive this advanced form of energy"

"For me it is more important where the commercial thing will be in the future and how UK will catch up in this."

OK but you do admit that your statement that "no other place had the infrastructure and people to receive this advanced form of energy" obviously cannot be true given the fairly hot competition to host the reactor?

And if that's untrue then what about your other statements comparing France and the UK?

my husband works for an IT company in England and he says the French HQ is useless - everything that was done the french way had to redone

Aside of the anglo/franco debate, it's a fair point.
I actually didn't realise just how much a person can deteriorate in 10 years until I watched my MIL with my own eyes.
She forgets everything, conversations we had last week, is short tempered, everything is too much trouble, her health is poor, eye sight is awful, there is no way she could lift anything at all. And has a nap between 12-2 each day.
Last week she left her washing in the tumble drier for 25 hours, woke in the middle of the night remembered it but couldn't be bothered to get up and turn it off.
She couldn't hold down a part time job never mind full time at the age of 65 and she's a boomer with the full benefits of a good diet and health service.
She was a teacher, it's actually frightening to think she could be allowed to work with small children.
Goodness knows how somebody who perhaps hasn't enjoyed such benefits at the beginning of their life might cope.