Dissertation_Paula Aleksandrowicz_12 ... - Jacobs University

of working conditions – automatisation makes human work redundant. Other measures
advocated by Behrens (1999) or by Morschhäuser (2002), like the balancing out of work
burdens or a diversification of tasks over the entire work life, are not feasible in companies
which are subject to cost pressure and to high market competition, or which pursue costcutting
as top priority.
Another barrier to the prolongation of working life is the reported unwillingness of older
workers to undergo changes in the work organisation or work content reported by some
interviewees from firms with a high share of blue-collar workers (between 62-84%)
pointing to higher risks to health and a related need of early exit due to disability (Oswald
1999: 4; VDR 2003: 116; Ebert et al. 2007: 139). Older workers, used to perform one and
the same task for many decades, do not want to adapt to new situations. Also monetary
reasons (higher pay in shift work, decrease in wages in case of downgrading 48 ) play a role.
The impact of workers´ preferences regarding retirement and (the form of) continued work
was included as explanatory variable of company agency in the original model (Fig. 1 in
chapter 2.). An example is the metal-manufacturing factory where the personnel manager
wanted to replace work incapacitated older workers who had performed monotonous and
physically-burdening work at the blast furnace with younger workers who had worked in a
dry, warm workshop. However, both parties objected to those measures – the younger ones
because of family responsibilities and interest in less burdening work, and the older ones
because of wage accruals for shift work (2_Firm DE-3_HRM).
On the basis of findings in this section, hypothesis 2A is not supported and hypothesis
2B is supported (see section 2.2.). The era of sheltered workplaces is largely over, and the
only remnant from a differential treatment of older and younger workers with regard to job
design and health management is their exemption from night shifts in some firms, or the
provision of extra holidays (predominantly in firms in the collective bargaining sector of
NGG). However, those provisions have been undermined by the Equalisation Law of 2006
(Kocher 2005: 317). Therefore, there are no differential health management policies based
on the criterion of age, which speaks in favour of hypothesis 2B. Admittedly, many firms
(see above) apply a policy of externalisation towards impaired workers (see below
paragraph), and that often affects older employees on grounds of work-related wear and
48 With the exception of firms with a collectively agreed downgrading protection.
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