Ms Mary Murphy:

Like Mr. Mellon said, we are looking for age-friendly workplaces. What we are talking about is that this is a kind of negative of something which employers should not be able to do with mandatory retirement but, beyond that, there are more positive things we are talking about, which is what employers should be doing to make workplaces more suitable for older workers. When one talks about internal mobility and about flexibility in moving to part-time work in instances like that, this is crucial to the making of these.

Workplaces that are suitable for older persons are suitable for everyone because people throughout their life course may go through periods where they want to work part-time for a bit. Part of why that will occur is because of caring responsibilities where older workers will often take on caring responsibilities at that stage in their lives. Yes, we would very much encourage workplaces to learn to facilitate and to move on that, if someone has been working in a certain role and, for various reasons such as new health concerns emerging or whatever else, they are then not able to complete or feel comfortable with certain responsibilities. There might then be an opportunity to move them to a different kind of role or setting within the workplace.