Labour Market Transitions and the Erosion of the Fordist Lifecycle: Discarding Older Workers in the Automobile Manufacturing and Banking Industries in the United States

The automobile manufacturing and banking industries provide ideal contrasting cases for analysing the changing nature of the employment contract and the resultant effect on older workers. In the auto industry the main thrust of firm activity has been to discard older workers who are viewed as dispensable because of their higher wages and health care costs compared to younger workers. The primary tactics employed have been to offer early retirement incentives and to extend overtime to older workers during periods of production increases instead of hiring younger workers. The prospect of a lengthy working week provides an additional incentive for older workers to retire. In the banking industry, older workers are viewed as costly and untrainable, and bank managers have taken every opportunity to discard them. In different ways, both industries illustrate a more general lack of concern with older workers as evidenced by the absence of worker retraining programmes and government efforts to encourage older worker retention in the U.S. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance (2003) 28, 640–651. doi:10.1111/1468-0440.00251