Five months ago, Sandra Ackland became one of the millions of British workers furloughed after lockdown started. Her income fell by £400 a month. But she was not too worried since she lived carefully within her means, had just started a new job as a sales executive, and had begun working from home before the pandemic, after moving from the suburbs of London to live by the coast in Camber Sands, East Sussex.
Then last month, after Chancellor Rishi Sunak moved to start easing state support for his job retention scheme, she was made redundant. So she went straight out and landed a job serving food and drinks five days a week in a local beach bar. She added another job as a housekeeper for holiday lettings. “I never thought for a minute that I’d be on minimum wage in a beach bar when only a year ago I was working in an office and earning £45,000,” she says.
Ackland is the mother of a daughter with mental health problems and her teenage stepson has autism. She is 50 years old, a difficult age as dark economic storm clouds gather; huge job losses are announced almost daily and several key sectors, from entertainment to retail, are in meltdown. She isn’t downcast. Instead she spends any spare time setting up her own business, building a website and starting to sell personalised goods, already picking up some trade from former clients. “I just feel people my age have to be able to adapt to change,” she said. “Perhaps I am lucky that I can reinvent myself because I know some people struggle and become gloomy.”
Change can be hard to handle. It is especially challenging for older people, who have spent decades doing the same job, and have watched their firm and their future suddenly smashed by a disease that erupted in China. On a regular basis we hear of household names, from British Airways to Marks & Spencer, shedding vast numbers of staff, while below the radar thousands of small businesses and self-employed people are struggling for survival. We stand on the edge of economic catastrophe while confronting a pandemic that exposes gaping flaws in society even as it speeds up huge changes in the way we live and work.
There has, rightly, been considerable focus on younger generations hurt on several fronts by this crisis. But another chunk of society may, ultimately, suffer even more from these turbulent events. Some analysts fear those hardest hit could be older workers, the pandemic devastating their mental and physical health as well as their wealth. Many men and women in their 50s and early 60s may never hold down a permanent job again, tumbling into a financial hole that corrodes their sense of self-worth just as the state pension age goes up later this year.
Official data shows those hit hardest by pandemic are people at the start and end of the working age range. It raises issues at both ends of the labour market. Yet it also presents our rapidly-ageing society with a new problem. During Britain’s last period of swollen unemployment in the Thatcher era, it was simply accepted people in their sixties would retire, but now things are different.”The need to get people over 60 back into work has never been thought about before in a recession. It is a new thing for this country — but we can’t just shuffle them out of work,” says Emily Andrews, research manager at the Centre for Ageing Better.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe