Cut old people’s wages, says wealthy professor

Let’s get creative about wages, said London Business School professor Lynda Gratton in a speech to the World Business Forum in Sydney in May. Let’s explore “playing around” with age and salary structures to stop age discrimination at work.

“We’ve only ever seen age and salary as a straight line that goes up,” she said, “but why don’t we think about it as a line that goes down?”

Creative? Playing around? This is old-school capitalism – simply another way of saying workers have to bear the cost of the system’s stuff-ups and crises.

Unknown to the likes of Gratton, there’s a real world out there in which most workers are struggling well before they reach retirement age.

From Tony Abbott’s “try before you buy” slavery for young workers and unemployment benefits below the poverty line, to Gratton’s wage cut advice for older workers, there is relentless pressure to reduce our wages and living conditions so that the bosses can make more profits.

Workers are being pushed to stay on the job till they’re 70 (or older). But according to the Age Discrimination Commission, half of jobseekers over the age of 50 face discrimination. The government acknowledges this, offering employers a $10,000 grant to take on anyone over 50.

The Human Rights Commission reported that, of those who are employed, more than a quarter face age-based discrimination. It jumps to 41 percent of those earning $35,000 or less.

For older women, the situation is already dire. The gap between average female and male wages has hit a 20-year high – nearly 19 percent – and up to 30 percent in some industries. As a consequence, women have much lower levels of superannuation.

Further to this, new research by the OECD suggests that the poverty rate for older people in Australia is already 2.5 times the OECD average.

Cutting old people’s wages isn’t creative; it’s a way to increase poverty.

Right now age discrimination is illegal, but the likes of Gratton are the heralds of the kind of world Tony Abbott has in mind.

The challenge for our side is to make sure such a world never sees the light of day.