Early retirement for the lost generation

No second chance for older workers in Croatian job market, says Dr Maja Vehovec

It has been some years since I have been required to seek information from Croatian institutions on a daily basis. The first step in researching my story about age discrimination in the workplace - getting statistics and analysis from the employment bureau (HZZ) - brought back some gloomy memories.

After days and days of futile calls to their public relations office, a room in which apparently nobody spends their working hours, it wasn't much of a surprise to find out there is no analysis of changes in the average ages of Croatia’s unemployed population.

This, despite the fact that even the most cursory of looks at the statistics available on the HZZ website reveals quite a dramatic change in recent years.

In 1989, a year before Croatia started to become acquainted with the wonders of capitalism, there were 144,810 unemployed people and about 3.2 per cent of those were older than 50 years of age.

In 1994, the percentage of unemployed over 50s was 7.3 per cent and in 1999 it rose again to 9.9 per cent. If things were bad in the 90s, the new millennium has proved to be devastating for this age group.

In 2005, there were 307,851 unemployed people in Croatia and 22.8 per cent of those were aged 50 plus. Last year, 26 per cent of Croatia’s 319,845 unemployed were over 50s.

Dr Maja Vehovec, an expert at Zagreb’s Economic Institute and editor of the book New Perspective on a Longer Working Life in Croatia and Slovenia, warns me this is only half the problem.

The true number of unemployed older workers is probably much higher, as high rates of early, some say premature, retirement among the over 50s effectively disguises the scale of the problem.

After conducting a survey of 216 Croatian and 200 Slovenian companies, Vehovec established age discrimination is highly prevalent, although employers spoke very nicely of older workers by praising their experience, knowledge, people skills and reliability.

However, there are many reasons why employers still prefer to take on young workers. For a start, they cost less, have smaller salaries and often agree to receive part of their salary as in hand, untaxed and, therefore, not attracting benefits.

“Older workers won’t often accept that. They also ask more questions and say things like: 'But this is not smart' or 'we’ve never done things this way'. Employers simply feel better with young workers”, says Vehovec.

Given the choice between being sacked or accepting early retirement, many 50 somethings end up retired at their prime. Life isn’t easy, as they struggle to survive on small pensions.

The alternative, however, is much worse because this age group just does not get a second chance in the job market, stresses Vehovec.

It is practically impossible for them to find a new job. And if they do, it's usually much worse than the one they had before. Education and retraining programmes offer better opportunities, but they come at a price and are often prohibitively expensive for the average Croatian.

My efforts to find out how much of an impact these sorts of programmes have on getting over 50s back into work have proved fruitless so far.

The HZZ informs me that between 50 and 60 per cent of participants of their back-to-work programmes get new jobs within 12 months. Unfortunately, they have been unable to break down this figure by age group, so it is impossible to tell if their programmes are successful for the over 50s.

Next stop is Macedonia, where I sincerely hope I will be much luckier in the search for reliable and detailed statistics.

Ruzica Matic is a Zagreb-based journalist who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

She will be writing regular updates on her investigation into age discrimination in the workplace in Croatia and Macedonia following the collapse of communism, and in France and the UK.