Older workers are not expendable – we need to challenge workplace ageism
Published: 10 October 2025
Commentary
The message from the Government is that we need to delay retirement and work for longer for the sake of the economy, but ageist attitudes see older people treated as if they were expendable. Professor Kathleen Riach discusses ageism in the workplace.
The past year has seen record payouts in age discrimination cases, including a staggering £3.2 million award to one claimant who had been sacked after a 45-minute lecture in which he was described as an “old fossil” who “didn’t know how to deal with millennials”.
But these headlines are only part of the bigger story of our ageing workforce. Such sums belie the far greater cost to the UK economy measured not in tribunal judgments, but in wasted potential and a silencing of our experiences due to age-hostile workplaces.
One in three people over 50 believe they have been turned down for a job because of their age. Age-hostile cultures don’t just humiliate older workers, they undermine our collective prosperity.
The national conversation about an ageing population has for years been fixated on one blunt tool of raising the state pension age. But what good is this economic nudge to stay in the labour market when at the very moment the UK needs people to work longer, too many workplaces are pushing them out?
From redundancy rounds that quietly target older staff to enduring ageist stereotypes, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain credibility and recognition as you grow older in the workplace – even if in a position of relative power – and even harder to get back into the labour market if unemployed.
This paradox needs to sit at the heart of the UK’s ageing debate: we say we need older workers, and that people need to work into older age, but we still treat them as expendable. Until we resolve that contradiction, we will keep wasting talent and short-changing our economy.
But age hostility is not just about these explicit agendas or perceptions. It is also connected to something more insidious. Our collective social hesitance to speak honestly and openly about what it means to grow older at work allows ageism to continue to thrive in the labour market.
This requires a more mature conversation that values the insight and perspective age can bring, but also acknowledges that motivations, capacities and preferences change as we move through our careers. Work at 25 does not feel the same as at 55 and organisations that both recognise and accommodate this will unlock the full potential of their workforce.
Workplaces must begin to consider how to integrate productive and balanced conversations about growing older into both their policies and everyday practice – often something that they shy away from for fear of being accused of being ageist.
But this is a misplaced concern. By silencing or refusing to engage with the realities of growing older at work, we are denied the opportunity to see ageing in work as not about decline but a generative experience where new outlooks, opportunities, skills and capacities might emerge.
First and foremost, this work needs to be done in the workplace, not the courtroom. If we fail to act, the soaring cost of employment tribunal payouts is just the tip of the iceberg and a glimpse of the far greater costs we may pay in our own working lives by staying silent about growing older at work.
Kathleen Riach is Professor of organisation studies at the Adam Smith Business School. Her book, Working Through Ageing: Experiencing Growing Up and Older at Work, is published by Bristol University Press.
This article first appeared in The Scotsman on 6 October 2025.
First published: 10 October 2025