Sol Encel

Older workers: can they succeed in the job market?

Objectives: To identify and track the progress of mature age workers who have overcome barriers associated with their age. To identify factors contributing to successful employment outcomes for older workers. To evaluate the success rate of service providers in facilitating access to the labour market for older workers.

Working in later life

The issue of work in later life has assumed increasing salience as the population (and consequently the work force) continues to age. Within 10 years, the average age of the work force will be over 40, and employers will have to face up to the fact that the pool of young school leavers is steadily shrinking.

Older Workers: Trends and Prospects

As a result of declining or stable fertility rates and an increase in life expectancy the populations of the case countries are set to age markedly over the next 50 years. Table 1 shows fertility rates and life expectancy at birth in the case countries between 1980 and 2000. Fertility rates fell between 1980 and 2000, and markedly so in Japan. Among the countries Japan also has the longest life expectancy at birth. Table 2 reports the proportion of the population of the case countries between 1980 and 2050 aged over 60 and 65. This shows that each country is set to age markedly over the next 50 years. Japan will have the most aged population, with over one-third of its population aged over 60 or over 65 by 2050.

Later-life employment.

Karl Marx once observed that the past sits like an Alp on the minds of the living. In a world where the average age of the population is rising steadily, it should be obvious that we need to rethink many established assumptions about the role of older people in the community, and adjust existing institutions accordingly. In practice, there is enormous resistance to these adjustments. Martha White Riley describes this as ‘‘structural lag’’:

No room at the inn: American responses to Australian immigration policies, 1946–54

ABSTRACT After the Second World War, Australia introduced a new immigration policy based on the concept of ‘populate or perish’. Through the International Refugee Organization (IRO), 170,000 DPs migrated to Australia between 1947 and 1950, funded by the United Nations and the Australian government. Jews were largely excluded from this programme and the Minister for Immigration even prohibited the IRO from continuing to support the migration to Australia, based on family reunion, of individual Jewish survivors. In addition, the Australian government introduced other discriminatory policies that ensured that Jews remained only 0.5 per cent of the overall population. Based on archival research in the files of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society and the American Joint Distribution Committee, Rutland and Encel analyse the entrenched racism in Australian society that contributed to these policies, and the reactions of the American Jewish leadership to them.

The Post-industrial Society and the Corporate State

Following the debacle of the Australian Labor Party in 1975 and 1977, I wrote a paper which attempted to place these events in an international perspective (Encel, 1977). At that time, I was only dimly aware of the rapid growth of the comparative literature in this field, i.e. the relation between the neo-capitalist economy, changes in class structure, and the political ups and downs of the 1960s and 1970s. In this paper, I propose to concentrate on two or three particular aspects of the earlier analysis in the light of this literature, and of certain politicoeconomic developments of the 1970s.

An Encounter with Daniel Bell

an interesting comparison with that of his close contemporary and Harvard colleague, J. K. Galbraith, in economics. Bell and Galbraith have both had considerable success in coining social metaphors which, like artistic creations, hold up a mirror to society. To Galbraith we owe the affluent society, the technostructure, the conventional wisdom, and countervailing power; to Bell, the end of ideology and the postIndustrial society.

Smaller Jewish communities in Australia

Australia has reliable (if under-enumerated) data on its Jewish communities. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) conducts a population census every five years and the responses to all questions are tabulated without sampling. A standard question at the census, unchanged since the federation of Australia in 1901, requires respondents to state their religious affiliation. The definition of ‘Jewish’ relies on self-identification, consistent with the approach used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other central statistical agencies throughout the world. However, some Jews may consistently decide for a number of reasons not to disclose their religious denomination: it is not compulsory to answer this question. There may be the fear of antisemitism, distrust of government agencies, or reluctance to divulge personal details. Moreover, those who regard themselves as Jewish but who are not observant may not wish to have their identity linked only with religion. An estimate of 20 to 25 per cent has been accepted as a constant under-enumeration factor by a number of Australian demographers. In 2001 and again in 2006, very reliable statistics for Sydney were gathered from educational bodies and they confirm a census under-enumeration of around 20 per cent. Therefore, whilst the census gives a total of 86,000 Jews in Australia, the likely total based on 20 per cent of under-enumeration is closer to 105,000

Book Reviews : THE MELBOURNE JEWISH COMMUNITY: A NEEDS ASSESSMENT STUDY John Goldlust, Canberra, Australian Government Publishing Service, 1993

The area I would suggest needs strengthening is that of project design where the only example given (’Barriers to mature-aged learning’) is very narrow and unimaginative: recommending reading other research on the particular topic, getting the statistics to demonstrate the issue (surely a prior act not central to the question at hand), and a questionnaire followed by interviews with the students. Why not exploratory discussions followed by a questionnaire, and then feeding the questionnaire data into subsequent group discussions? Why not a participatory-observational design involving groups of mature-aged students? Why not involve some of the students in systematically collecting their own case data about barriers they experience using diaries? Why not a constructivist dialogic design involving all the main relevant parties students, administrators, teachers, government policy people? Or a search conference or a modified Delphi either at the outset or to consider data collected previously ? Or why not use the literature review as ’starter data’ for a series of group discussions? This issue about standard (but less imaginative) research designs of course is not restricted to this book, but may be a quite wide problem for sociology in general.

Antisemitism and prejudice in Australia

Antisemitism in Australia has never been more than a minor problem although its impact on policy towards immigration has not been insignificant. Today, the Jewish community in Australia is a staunch advocate of the prevailing policy of multiculturalism.