Demographic and cultural change in the workplace – in the UK and around the world – have encouraged policy makers, employers, and employee interest groups like trade unions to keep a close eye on all forms of discrimination there. Age has joined sex, and disability as unavoidably hot topics for all human resource practitioners, as well as for all employers and employees. Library and information services, above all those where the age profile indicates that age is a factor or soon will become one, for professional know‐how, for succession planning, and for recruitment, cannot ignore these forms of change. This is no mere rhetorical compliance with the political correctness of diversity management: this is where knowledge walks out the door at 65 and does not come back. Perhaps a good thing: older employees should make way, have had their bite of the cherry, are hard to retrain, lack modern technological skills, and have bad backs. Many choose not to stay on and that takes care of itself.
Such comments reconfirm how age discrimination at work is as much a matter of perception as fact, or stereotype as human resource planning. Sargeant's study of age discrimination provides a topical and interpretive introduction to the subject and concentrates on the UK. One chapter is international and comparative, making telling comparisons between the UK and Australia and Canada, Ireland and the USA (on issues like applicable law, interpretations of law like exceptions based on job requirements, bona fide occupational qualifications, and mandatory retirement). Another is on the European Union, considering demographic and migration shifts in employment, and the Framework Directive 2000/78/EC that has shaped UK thinking more than a little. The rest is focused on UK law, policy, and practice. Sargeant's other work includes works on employment law and workplace consultation and transfer of undertakings. The work under review is aimed at the human resources specialist but will have relevance to all employers and to employees interested in rights and arrangements for older employees (especially if they are older themselves). It opens up several layers of interpretive application for these groups of reader, and by that token may interest employment lawyers too in a more general way.
The UK focus is clear from the start: Sargeant's discussion of the ways in which age discrimination legislation and policy came into being in the period from the mid‐1990s to date, and the debates and stakeholder interests at the time (still very much present!) helps to explain why it took and takes so long, why equality and diversity will always be complex, and why consultations, policy statements, and regulations (like the Age Regulations 2006) come into existence in painful ways. Voices like the Confederation of British Industry, Age Concern, and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development are heard there. The slogan to outlaw age discrimination sounds resonant and all very well, but the harder edge comes through in whether retirement should be compulsory and when it should be. Sargeant is sceptical about the mere rhetoric of employment and age (and indeed race, gender, and disability) rights and suggests that, when it comes to the interpretation and implementation and enforcement of legal arrangements, employer policy, and case law have highlighted more than a few anomalies and inconsistencies.
One of the problems is that the concept of age can mean anything – we all have it, some more than others, so where does it reach the point of making anyone a target for discrimination or even harassment? We usually think of older employees (defined here as being between 50 and 65, assuming 65 is the normal retirement age) and perhaps those “senior” members of society (beyond 65). In either category there are men and women who do not work but want to work, are working and do not want to do so, and more and more who want the opportunity (even the right) to work after 65. The shift of official language from mandatory retirement age to default retirement age reflects the changes introduced into the work place by the Age Regulations 2006. Sargeant devotes chapter 8 (there are eight chapters) to interpreting and explaining these regulations, and his critique will prove an interesting discussion to HR specialists as well as, more generally, to employers and employees. He explains, for instance, “objective justification” exceptions, eligibility of older employees for vocational training (and how that is defined), and teases out the general exceptions (things like working beyond retirement, the national minimum wage, and the duties of the employer to inform and consider requests to work on). Readers know that they can pick up the regulations elsewhere (e.g. online) but his interpretation of the various sections comes well after the fuller arguments and research in the book itself.
Sargeant also provides a lot of useful, and usefully digested, background information about age discrimination. His analysis of how different age groups, including younger people, can be discriminated against, is helpful (and there are short sections on retail and law, finance, and transport). His discussion of what he calls “multiple discrimination”, where age discrimination applies along with gender, ethnicity, and disability issues, as it often does, is timely. These really open up areas of employment law which are more fully covered by a wide range of books and articles, some of which are helpfully cited in the book. Throughout the book there is a critical strand which emerges in numerous hard‐hitting and though‐provoking comments. He makes it clear that the UK could learn from the way Canada looked holistically at lifestyle, circumstances and priorities of older workers rather than merely redesignating mandatory retirement with default retirement. He asks us to inspect phrases like “objective justification” carefully, because, in his view, the wording of the law and subsequent interpretations reveal the success of the employer‐led agenda (p. 121). In his view employees “can be dismissed for reasons of retirement at any age on or after the age of 65” (and that employee rights have dwindled with the repeal of the Employment Rights Act 1996 which “took away their right to complain of unfair dismissal”).
He reserves his strongest arguments for the Framework Directive itself, the result he claims of institutional discrimination in the EU (hard to prove) and opening the door in UK measures like the Age Regulations 2006 for “age discrimination if it can be objectively justified” (p. 120). Because it can be justified too easily, this had led to uneven and unfair treatment. Rightly sceptical about what he calls minimum levels of protection and differentiated treatment of different types of employee, Sargeant adds a thoughtfully incisive dimension to the book. Age Discrimination in Employment is one of several from Gower on this general theme, and one of many now in the field as a whole. It makes a good text for students on human resources courses, as well as for practitioners. It also reminds us, library and information practitioners and everyone else, that age beckons, not so much with a scythe as with another policy interpretation.
