Prague, May 9 (CTK) – One in five Czechs over 55 years is seeking a job and the chances of finding it are very low in this age group, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes yesterday.
Experts point out that the population is ageing and the number of the elderly unemployed will be rising. Part-time jobs for them might solve the problem, LN says.
“People over 50 are a significant part of the labour market. In the near future, this age group will rank among the key players thanks to their long-term professional competences,” Czech Labour Office director Katerina Sadilkova told LN.
Nevertheless, the reality is different, the paper writes, referring to the statistics.
The number of the jobless over 55 has been constantly rising. At the end of 2015, there were almost 89,000 of them and at the end of March, their number reached 90,000 in the country with a population of 10.5 million.
Many people of this age are limited by their health condition when they are seeking jobs. Besides, they are discouraged by their frequent failures in competitions, Labour Office spokeswoman Katerina Berankova said.
The reasons for a high unemployment among the elderly are also the prejudices of employers who suppose that these people cannot learn new things and adapt to changes so easily and they do not manage to keep pace with the technological development, Sadilkova said, adding that the most frequent obstacle is their insufficient foreign language proficiency.
Vit Jasek, executive director of the Union of Employers, has confirmed this stance of Czech employers.
“Unfortunately, many firms do not consider people over 55 perspective. If they are to choose between a 25-year-old and a 55-year old applicant, they invest in the younger one,” Jasek said.
“Direct demand for employees over 55 years is almost zero,” Lenka Cerna, executive director of the Annonce advertisement website, said.
Elderly people with a low qualification have the worst chances on the labour market, LN says.
Experts say a better offer of part-time jobs could help increase the employment in this age group.
However, the Czech Republic lags behind other European countries in this trend. Only 14.3 percent of elderly people work part-time in the Czech Republic, according to the data of the Czech Statistical Office (CSU), while in the Netherlands, which leads the rankings in this respect, it is 53.4 percent, LN writes.
Three in ten jobless people are seeking part-time jobs, but employers offer them only in one in ten cases. At present, labour offices register 10,700 part-time jobs, mainly for the positions of security guards, shop-assistants, call centre workers and seamstresses.
The Czech Labour Office supports the employment of people in pre-retirement age within its “active employment policy,” including retraining courses, community work and financial contributions to wages for the firms that employ people over 55.
However, part-time jobs in the same profession are better for these people than retraining that is efficient only until a certain age, while community works are successful primarily in small municipalities Jasek says.
The Czech government has approved the National Action Plan of Positive Ageing for 2013-17 with the aim to change the attitude of employers and the whole society to people over 50, LN writes.
