In the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the present reconfiguring of corporate purpose, there is an opportunity to realign actions focused on prolonging working lives. We put forward a transformative agenda concerned with workforce ageing that aligns with contemporary expectations regarding sustainability, inequality, and emerging conceptualisations of management. In this article, the new concept of Common Good human resource management (HRM) is utilised as a potential means of encouraging business responses focused on grand challenges such as population ageing. We suggest how these principles might be applied to the issue of managing age in workplaces, to recast debate about issues of age and work, to be used as an advocacy tool encouraging employer engagement, while providing a framework that might direct organisational leadership.

It has often been stated by older people's advocates that discrimination affecting older people is commonplace and ongoing in the Australian labour market. In this article, we contrast such rhetoric with a review of evidence from recent large-scale surveys which demonstrates that low and declining numbers of Australians experience age discrimination, while highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon. We identify the emergence of a fake ‘age’ advocacy that is acting to the detriment of an informed public discourse concerning issues of older workers’ employment. To counter this we propose five underlying principles for advocacy on ageing and work: countering myths concerning the extent and nature of age barriers in the labour market; avoiding and challenging the use of age stereotypes in making the business case for older workers’ employment; recognition that age interacts in complex ways with a range of other factors in determining people's experiences of the labour market; challenging public understanding that is grounded in the notion that generational conflict is inevitable; and discarding traditional notions of the lifecourse in order to overcome disjunctions and contradictions that hamper efforts to encourage and support longer working lives.

In the April 2016 issue of the Journal of Social Policy (vol 45, part 2 pp251-268), there was an article by Philip Taylor and Catherine Earl entitled ‘The Social Construction of Retirement and Evolving Policy Discourse of Working Longer’ which contains the following statement: “The case for early exit was argued, in part, on the back of efforts to re-distribute work to the young. Macnicol (2008) describes this as ‘misguided short-termism’ attempting to facilitate economic modernisation” (p251). This should have read “Macnicol (2008) describes as incorrect commentary that this was ‘misguided short-termism’ attempting to facilitate economic modernisation.” The authors acknowledge that the statement in their article was incorrect and apologise for this oversight.

The roles that older workers play in labour markets has received a great deal of policy and academic scrutiny in response to economic crises and demographic change. As a starting point, this focus has paradoxically resulted in insufficient attention to older workers themselves. The article is thus concerned with refocusing the agenda for research onto the older worker. Building on an extensive literature review, four gaps in knowledge are identified: who might be researched; what the focus of that research might be; the role of theory informing the research; and how the research might be conducted. The article identifies a particular need for research on ‘work’ as opposed to ‘retirement’ and how the changing nature of work may influence future patterns of later life labour market engagement and retirement. It is argued that better public policy will result from more critical and socially embedded research that recognises the heterogeneity of ‘older workers’ and their motivations.

This article is concerned with the evolving social construction of older workers and retirement. Evolving and competing ‘world-views’ from public policy, and social advocacy of productive and vulnerable older workers, are described and critiqued. Contradictions and disjunctions, in terms of public policies aimed at changing employer behaviour towards older workers, are identified. It is argued that present representations of older workers have serious flaws that provide a weak basis for policy development and may not only undermine the prospects for overcoming prejudicial societal attitudes but may in fact strengthen them. It is further argued that sheltering older workers in employment placements will inevitably limit the extent and nature of their participation. Instead, the mainstreaming of their employment is justified, bearing in mind negative attitudes towards ageing.