“Grandparents” having too much free time

In many work places, people are discriminated because of their age when they try to get a job. I think that as we get older, we are unavoidably getting more experiences and more useful skills. However, in Mexico, like in other countries like Argentina and the USA, experience is not always taken into account and “old people” have a lot of problems in order to be hired, despite of the fact that for almost all the jobs, they can work as well as young people. I have to mention that fortunately, it is not in all areas, because biological sciences-public health, theology-religion, education and geography have the highest percentage of hired people older than 45. Nevertheless, for people older than that, in general the unemployment or the difficulty of getting a new job is high.

I think there are some problems they have to confront related to economic issues. One is about health and health benefits. I have heard that some employers are reluctant to hire older workers because they are sure that old people will be more expensive in terms of health benefits due to pains of the age than young people. Moreover, some employers might hesitate to train older workers; they assume that older employees will retire too soon, and fail to give back the employer what he invested on the training. That is not necessarily true because the investment can be retrieved not in a short term, but with time and effort in short term. It is important to know that, for example, most times if they are looking for a job, they do not have little children to take care and have more time to dedicate to the work.

It is also known that some people believe that older people attract more problems than the problems they can solve. For example, employers are always thinking that older people are outdated and some reports mention that 90% of the enterprises do not even permit that people this age be interviewed for the human resources department. In this case the employers do not consider that if those people take some kind of update courses and if it is added the experience (life- and occupational-experience), they could be as productive or more than young people.

Considering the things I mentioned above, it is clear that when people are over 45 years, the difficulty in order to get job becomes larger. On the other hand, it is also it highlighted that for certain situations, there are more advantages in hiring older people and that needs to be soon considered for a better development of the different corporations.