28th April 2011
All the latest stories from the world of work
Employees do not become less productive as they get older, according to new research from the Universität Mannheim. The study, ‘Productivity and Age: Evidence from work teams at the assembly line’, showed that output per worker actually increased throughout working lives, all the way to retirement.
The researchers monitored employees of all ages on a production line in a Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Germany. They concluded that the negative effects of aging are offset by other gains associated with greater experience, such as an ability to cope when things went wrong.
These effects are evident when looking at the errors made during production. Older workers were found to make more errors, which can be explained by their declining physical ability, but the study also showed that they hardly make any severe errors, possibly because they are more experienced.
The researchers commented that they expect to see larger productivity gains among older workers in the service sector, where physical attributes such as strength are less important for productivity.
76 per cent of HR professionals believe we are entering a new and more unstable era for industrial relations, according to the latest survey from the CIPD. 43 per cent of public sector respondents said they were expecting an increase in possible strike action in the next year, compared with 21 per cent in the private sector and 10 per cent in the not-for-profit sector.
Although 55 per cent of respondents describe relations between managers and unions as positive or very positive, this figure has dropped by 10 per cent since the summer of 2008 when the last survey was carried out.
For those who had experienced strike action in their organisation, the most common reason was redundancies, followed by pay and pensions. A third of respondents had a pending dispute in their organisation that could escalate to a ballot for strike action, however the experience varied considerably by sector. 4 in 10 public sector organisations had a dispute that could escalate to a ballot for strike action, compared with just 8 percent of manufacturing and production organisations.
Maintaining and developing high levels of employee engagement is regarded as both the most likely (65%) and most desirable (59%) focus for developing the employment relationship going forward.
Having a bad job can be as harmful to health as having no job at all according to new research from Canberra University. Work is often seen as helping to support good mental health, but these latest findings show that that poorly paid, short-term and poorly supported jobs can have a significant detrimental effect on a person's mental health.
The researchers analysed seven waves of data from more than 7,000 people of working age, drawn from a representative national household survey in Australia.
The results showed that those who were unemployed had poorer mental health, overall, than those in work. But after taking into account a range of factors with the potential to influence the results, such as educational attainment and marital status, the mental health of those who were jobless was comparable with, or often better than, that of people in work, but in poor-quality jobs.
Those in the poorest-quality jobs experienced the sharpest decline in mental health over time. There was a direct linear association between the number of unfavourable working conditions experienced and mental health, with each additional adverse condition lowering the mental health score, said the authors.
The findings were published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
