Open up training to older workers
End discrimination: open up training to older workers
TUC assistant general secretary Kay Carberry
TUC assistant general secretary Kay Carberry told the www.equal-works.com web audience on 26 July that older workers should be able to take up apprenticeships. ‘Why aren’t apprenticeships more widely open to people later in their careers who might want to change career or who might want to acquire new skills?’
Kay Carberry, previously head of the TUC’s Equal Rights Department, said our priorities should be to ‘scrutinise everything that happens in the workplace to make sure that it’s free of age discrimination. And secondly train older workers – give older workers more opportunities than they’ve got now.’
‘Not all older workers want the same thing,’ she emphasised. ‘Somebody who perhaps has been working in an arduous manual job is rightly going to be very concerned if they’re not going to be able to pick up their pension for years after they expected to. Somebody who’s spent their working life in a nice warm office and would like to go on doing that is going to be worried that their employer is going to be expecting them to go earlier than they would prefer.’
‘I think there are a lot of people who have worked in one particular field, who get into their late 50s, early 60s, don’t want to carry on doing that particular kind of work but would welcome the opportunity to do something a little bit different, and quite often they don’t get that opportunity.’
She said: ‘We would like to see public policy more finely attuned to individuals needs.’
If you’d like to see and hear everything Kay Carberry had to say, you can watch the entire debate on the video attached.