Advanced age workers and labor market policies: Strategic challenges, contumacious realities

Abstract

The projections on the evolution of the population worldwide and of the different territories, highlighting the special importance that the group of older people will have in it, has led to raise from different instances the opportunity of a broad political work both at the international level and by the state governments, so that, inter alia, measures are articulated to enable the active participation of older persons in social, economic, cultural and civic affairs.

The problem, however, arises immediately when considering the meaning that should be given primarily to the policy to be adopted in relation to this new situation. And, in this sense, our study focuses on the analysis of labor market policies –in their active version– linked to the issue of active aging, highlighting at this point the obsolete and immobile profile that they present, which leads them to turn their backs to the challenges posed by changes in the new sociodemographic and occupational reality.

On the contrary, labor market policies or employment policies (both in employment and in employment) are demanded for older workers who exceed the current horizon before us, and which is characterized by its fragmentary profile, with an excessive adherence to the old scenario of bonuses, and in which the measures related to the permanence and access to employment of the collective of older workers are in sharp decline.