Friday 25 September 2009

UK retirement age challenge fails

Unbelievable but sadly only too believable. The High Court has ruled that it is legal for UK employers to force workers to retire at the age of 65.

In the UK, a worker can see their employment end at the age of 65 without any redundancy payment - even if they do not want to retire.

The case had been brought by Age Concern and Help the Aged which argued that the compulsory retirement age goes against EU regulations.

But their challenge, heard in July, has now been thrown out by the court. As usual we have judges making crucial social decisions with no account given to social implications. Maybe we should throw them out at 65 instead of being able to continue until at least 70 and then most of them can continue to do a range of legal work up until 75. More and more institutions are lining up to ditch this policy. Even this G'ment has brought forward a review of this to 2010 - when of course they may not be in power. In the meantime thousands of people will have their livelihood stopped at exactly the same time as the G'ment are trying to encourage older people to say in employment longer. Does joined up thinking mean anything to these people! Of course MP's also are not thrown out at 65.....

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