The status of ageing workers varies according to their functional condition, which itself is influenced by their past working history. Their status also depends on the work post that they occupy, and the social, cultural and economic situation of the country in which they live.
Thus, workers who have to perform much physical labour are also, most often, those who have had the least schooling and the least occupational training. They are subject to exhausting work conditions, which can cause disease, and they are exposed to the risk of accidents. In this context, their physical capacity is very likely to decline towards the end of their active life, a fact that makes them more vulnerable at work.
Conversely, workers who have had the advantage of lengthy schooling, followed by occupational training that equips them for their work, in general practise trades where they can put to use the knowledge thus acquired and progressively widen their experience. Often they do not work in the most harmful occupational environments and their skills are recognized and valued as they grow older.
During a period of economic expansion and shortage of labour, ageing workers are recognized as having the qualities of “occupational conscientiousness”, being regular in their work, and being able to keep up their know-how. In a period of recession and unemployment, there will be greater emphasis on the fact that their work performance falls short of that of younger people and on their lower capacity to adapt to changes in work techniques and organization.
Depending on the countries concerned, their cultural traditions and their mode and level of economic development, consideration for ageing workers and solidarity with them will be more or less evident, and their protection will be more or less assured.
The time dimensions of the age/work relationship
The relationship between ageing and work covers a great diversity of situations, which can be considered from two points of view: on the one hand, work appears to be a transformation factor for the worker throughout his or her active life, the transformations being either negative (e.g., wear and tear, decline in skills, illnesses and accidents) or positive (e.g., acquisition of knowledge and experience); on the other hand, work reveals the changes connected with age, and this results in marginalization and even exclusion from the production system for older workers exposed to demands at work that are too great for their declining capacity, or on the contrary allows for progress in their working career if the content of the work is such that a high value is placed on experience.
Advancing age therefore plays the role of a “vector” on which events in life are registered chronologically, both at and outside work. Around this axis are hinged processes of decline and building, which are very variable from one worker to another. In order to take into account the problems of ageing workers in the design of work situations, it is necessary to take into account both the dynamic characteristics of changes connected with age and the variability of these changes among individuals.
The age/work relationship can be considered in the light of a threefold evolution:
- Work evolves. Techniques change; mechanization, automation, computerization and methods of information transfer, among other factors, tend or will tend to become more generalized. New products make their appearance, others disappear. New risks are revealed or extended (e.g., radiation and chemical products), others become less prominent. Work organization, labour management, the distribution of tasks and the work schedules are transformed. Some production sectors develop, while others decline. From one generation to another, the work situations encountered during the active life of the worker, the demands that they make and the skills that they require are not the same.
- Working populations change. Age structures are modified in accordance with demographic changes, the means of entering or retiring from work and attitudes towards employment. Women’s share in the working population continues to evolve. Genuine upheavals are occurring in the field of education, occupational training and access to the health system. All these transformations are at the same time producing generation-related and period-related effects which obviously influence the age/work relationship and which can to a certain extent be anticipated.
- Finally—a point that deserves emphasis—individual changes are in progress throughout one’s working life, and the adjustment between the characteristics of particular work and those of the people who carry it out is therefore frequently called into question.
Some processes of organic ageing and their relationship to work
The main organic functions involved in work decline in an observable way from the ages of 40 or 50, after some of them have undergone development up to the ages of 20 or 25.
In particular, a decline with age is observed in maximum muscular strength and range of joint movement. The reduction in strength is in the order of 15 to 20% between the ages of 20 and 60. But this is only an overall trend, and the variability among individuals is considerable. Moreover, these are maximum capacities; the decline is much less for more moderate physical demands.
One function that is very sensitive to age is regulation of posture. This difficulty is not very apparent for common and stable working positions (standing or sitting) but it becomes obvious in situations of disequilibrium that require precise adjustments, strong muscular contraction or joint movements at extreme angles. These problems become more severe when the work has to be carried out on unstable or slippery supports, or when the worker suffers a shock or unexpected jolt. The result is that accidents due to loss of balance become more frequent with age.
Sleep regulation becomes less reliable from the ages of 40 to 45 onwards. It is more sensitive to changes in working schedules (such as night work or shift work) and to disturbing environments (e.g., noise or lighting). Changes in the length and quality of sleep follow.
Thermoregulation also becomes more difficult with age, and this causes older workers to have specific problems with regard to work in heat, particularly when physically intense work has to be carried out.
Sensory functions begin to be affected very early, but the resulting deficiencies are rarely marked before the ages of 40 to 45. Visual function as a whole is affected: there is a reduction in the amplitude of accommodation (which can be corrected with appropriate lenses), and also in the peripheral visual field, perception of depth, resistance to glare and light transmission through the crystalline lens. The resulting inconvenience is noticeable only in particular conditions: in poor lighting, near sources of glare, with objects or texts of very small size or badly presented, and so on.
The decline in auditory function affects the hearing threshold for high frequencies (high-pitched sounds), but it reveals itself particularly as difficulty in discriminating sound signals in a noisy environment. Thus, the intelligibility of the spoken word becomes more difficult in the presence of ambient noise or strong reverberation.
The other sensory functions are, in general, little affected at this time of life.
It can be seen that, in a general way, organic decline with age is noticeable particularly in extreme situations, which should in any case be modified to avoid difficulties even for young workers. Moreover, ageing workers can compensate for their deficiencies by means of particular strategies, often acquired with experience, when the work conditions and organization permit: the use of additional supports for unbalanced postures, lifting and carrying loads in such a way as to reduce extreme effort, organizing visual scanning so as to pinpoint useful information, among other means.
Cognitive ageing: slowing down and learning
As regards cognitive functions, the first thing to note is that work activity brings into play basic mechanisms for receiving and processing information on the one hand, and on the other, knowledge acquired throughout life. This knowledge concerns mainly the meaning of objects, signals, words and situations (“declarative” knowledge), and ways of doing things (“procedural” knowledge).
Short-term memory allows us to retain, for some dozens of seconds or for some minutes, useful information that has been detected. Processing of this information is carried out by comparing it with knowledge that has been memorized on a permanent basis. Ageing acts on these mechanisms in various ways: (1) by virtue of experience, it enriches knowledge, the capacity to select in the best way both useful knowledge and the method of processing it, especially in tasks that are carried out fairly frequently, but (2) the time taken to process this information is lengthened owing both to ageing of the central nervous system, and to more fragile short-term memory.
These cognitive functions depend very much on the environment in which the workers have lived, and therefore on their past history, their training, and the work situations which they have had to face. The changes that occur with age are therefore manifested in extremely varied combinations of phenomena of decline and reconstruction, in which each of these two factors may be more or less accentuated.
If in the course of their working lives workers have received only brief training, and if they have had to carry out relatively simple and repetitive tasks, their knowledge will be limited and they have difficulties when confronted with new or relatively unfamiliar tasks. If, moreover, they have to perform work under marked time constraints, the changes that have occurred in their sensory functions and the slowing down of their information processing will handicap them. If, on the other hand, they have had lengthy schooling and training, and if they have had to carry out a variety of tasks, they will thereby have been able to enhance their skills so that the sensory or cognitive deficiencies associated with age will be largely compensated for.
It is therefore easy to understand the role played by continued training in the work situation of ageing workers. Changes in work make it necessary more and more often to have recourse to periodic training, but older workers rarely receive it. Firms frequently do not consider it worthwhile to give training to a worker nearing the end of his or her active life, particularly as learning difficulties are thought to increase with age. And the workers themselves hesitate to undergo training, fearing that they will not succeed, and not always seeing very clearly the benefits that they could derive from training.
In fact, with age, the manner of learning is modified. Whereas a young person records the knowledge transmitted to him, an older person needs to understand how this knowledge is organized in relation to what he or she already knows, what is its logic, and what is its justification for work. He or she also needs time to learn. Therefore one response to the problem of training older workers is, in the first place, to use different teaching methods, according to each person’s age, knowledge and experience, with, in particular, a longer training period for older people.
Ageing of men and women at work
Age differences between men and women are found at two different levels. At the organic level, life expectancy is generally greater for women than for men, but what is called life expectancy without disability is very close for the two sexes—up to 65 to 70 years. Beyond that age, women are generally at a disadvantage. Moreover, women’s maximum physical capacity is on average 30% less than men’s, and this difference tends to persist with advancing age, but the variability in the two groups is wide, with some overlap between the two distributions.
At the level of the working career there are great differences. On average, women have received less training for work than men when they start their working life, they most often occupy posts for which fewer qualifications are needed, and their working careers are less rewarding. With age they, therefore, occupy posts with considerable constraints, such as time constraints and repetitiveness of the work. No sexual difference in the development of cognitive capacity with age can be established without reference to this social context of work.
If the design of work situations is to take account of these gender differences, action must be taken especially in favour of the initial and continuing vocational training of women and constructing work careers that increase women’s experiences and enhance their value. This action must, therefore, be taken well before the end of their active lives.
Ageing of working populations: the usefulness of collective data
There are at least two reasons for adopting collective and quantitative approaches with respect to the ageing of the working population. The first reason is that such data will be necessary in order to evaluate and foresee the effects of ageing in a workshop, a service, a firm, a sector or a country. The second reason is that the main components of ageing are themselves phenomena subject to probability: all workers do not age in the same way or at the same rate. It is therefore by means of statistical tools that various aspects of ageing will sometimes be revealed, confirmed or assessed.
The simplest instrument in this field is the description of age structures and of their evolution, expressed in ways relevant to work: economic sector, trade, group of jobs, and so on.
For example, when we observe that the age structure of a population in a workplace remains stable and young, we may ask which characteristics of the work could play a selective role in terms of age. If, on the contrary, this structure is stable and older, the workplace has the function of receiving people from other sectors of the firm; the reasons for these movements are worth studying, and we should equally verify whether the work in this workplace is suited to the characteristics of an ageing workforce. If, finally, the age structure shifts regularly, simply reflecting recruitment levels from one year to another, we probably have a situation where people “grow old on site”; this sometimes requires special study, particularly if the annual number of recruitments is tending to decline, which will shift the overall structure towards higher age groups.
Our understanding of these phenomena can be enhanced if we have quantitative data on working conditions, on the posts currently occupied by the workers and (if possible) on the posts that they no longer occupy. The work schedules, the repetitiveness of work, the nature of the physical demands, the work environment, and even certain cognitive components, can be the subject of queries (to be asked of the workers) or of evaluations (by experts). It is then possible to establish a connection between the characteristics of the present work and of past work, and the age of the workers concerned, and so to elucidate the selection mechanisms to which the work conditions can give rise at certain ages.
These investigations can be further improved by also obtaining information on the health status of the workers. This information can be derived from objective indicators such as the work accident rate or sickness absence rate. But these indicators often require considerable care as regards methodology, because although they do indeed reflect health conditions that may be work-related, they also reflect the strategy of all those concerned with occupational accidents and absence due to illness: the workers themselves, the management and the physicians can have various strategies in this regard, and there is no guarantee that these strategies are independent of the worker’s age. Comparisons of these indicators between ages are therefore often complex.
Recourse will therefore be had, when possible, to data arising from self-evaluation of health by the workers, or obtained during medical examinations. These data may relate to diseases whose variable prevalence with age needs to be better known for purposes of anticipation and prevention. But the study of ageing will rely above all on the appreciation of conditions that have not reached the disease stage, such as certain types of functional deterioration: (e. g., of the joints—pain and limitation of sight and hearing, of the respiratory system) or else certain kinds of difficulty or even incapacity (e. g. in mounting a high step, making a precise movement, maintaining equilibrium in an awkward position).
Relating data concerning age, work and health is therefore at the same time a useful and complex matter. Their use permits various types of connections to be revealed (or their existence to be presumed). It may be a case of simple causal relationships, with some requirement of the work accelerating a type of decline in the functional state as age advances. But this is not the most frequent case. Very often, we shall be led to appreciate simultaneously the effect of an accumulation of constraints on the a set of health characteristics, and at the same time the effect of selection mechanisms in accordance with which workers whose health has declined may find that they are excluded from certain kinds of work (what the epidemiologists call the “healthy worker effect”).
In this way we can evaluate the soundness of this collection of relationships, confirm certain fundamental knowledge in the sphere of psychophysiology, and above all obtain information that is useful for devising preventive strategies as regards ageing at work.
Some types of action
Action to be undertaken to maintain ageing workers in employment, without negative consequences for them, must follow several general lines:
- One must not consider this age group as a category apart, but must instead consider age as one factor of diversity among others in the active population; protective measures that are too targeted or too accentuated tend to marginalize and weaken the position of the populations concerned.
- One should anticipate individual and collective changes related to age, as well as changes in work techniques and organization. The management of human resources can be effectively carried out only over time, so as to prepare appropriate adjustments in work careers and training. The design of work situations can then take account at the same time of the available technical and organizational solutions and the characteristics of the (future) population concerned.
- The diversity of individual development throughout working life should be taken into consideration, so as to create conditions of equivalent diversity in work careers and situations.
- Attention should be devoted to favouring the process of building up skills and attenuating the process of decline.
On the basis of these few principles, several types of immediate action can first be defined. The highest priority of action will concern working conditions that are capable of posing particularly acute problems for older workers. As mentioned earlier, postural stresses, extreme exertion, strict time constraints (e.g., as with assembly-line work or the imposition of higher output goals), harmful environments (temperature, noise) or unsuitable environments (lighting conditions), night work and shift work are examples.
Systematic pinpointing of these constraints in posts that are (or may be) occupied by older workers allows an inventory to be drawn up and priorities to be established for action. This pinpointing can be carried out by means of empirical inspection checklists. Of equal use will be analysis of worker activity, which will permit observation of their behaviour to be linked with the explanations that they give of their difficulties. In these two cases, measures of effort or of environmental parameters may complete the observations.
Beyond this pinpointing, the action to be taken cannot be described here, since it will obviously be specific to each work situation. The use of standards may sometimes be useful, but few standards take account of specific aspects of ageing, and each one is concerned with a particular domain, which tends to give rise to thinking in an isolated fashion about each component of the activity under study.
Apart from the immediate measures, taking ageing into account implies longer-range thinking directed towards working out the widest possible flexibility in the design of work situations.
Such flexibility must first be sought in the design of work situations and equipment. Restricted space, nonadjustable tools, rigid software, in short, all the characteristics of the situation that limit the expression of human diversity in the carrying out of the task are very likely to penalize a considerable proportion of older workers. The same is true of the more constraining types of organization: a completely predetermined distribution of tasks, frequent and urgent deadlines, or too numerous or too strict orders (these, of course, must be tolerated when there are essential requirements relating to the quality of production or the safety of an installation). The search for such flexibility is, therefore, the search for varied individual and collective adjustments that can facilitate the successful integration of ageing workers into the production system. One of the conditions for the success of these adjustments is obviously the establishment of work training programmes, provided for workers of all ages and geared to their specific needs.
Taking ageing into account in the design of work situations thus entails a series of coordinated actions (overall reduction in extreme stresses, using all possible strategies for work organization, and continuous efforts to increase skills), which are all the more efficient and all the less expensive when they are taken over the long term and are carefully thought out in advance. The ageing of the population is a sufficiently slow and foreseeable phenomenon for appropriate preventive action to be perfectly feasible.