The Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) uses administrative data to count children living in households in receipt of both in-work and out-of-work means-tested benefits and provides small area ranking as an indicator of child poverty in neighbourhoods. Benefit take-up rates within an area will affect its reliability. We aimed to examine benefit take-up rates and compare area ranking by the IDACI with ranking using individually reported data across areas of varying ethnic composition. Mothers living in areas with high minority ethnic density were less likely to report claiming a benefit than those in majority White or mixed areas, despite reporting lower incomes. The correlation between self-reported material difficulties and worsening IDACI rank was much lower in areas characterised by minority ethnic populations. Further investigation into the performance of area-based deprivation measures in areas with high minority ethnic density is needed.

Employer reluctance to hire disabled people narrows the economic and vocational opportunities of disabled people. This study investigates employer hiring decisions to identify which mainstream employers are most likely to hire disabled people. The study reports findings from interviews with eighty-seven employers in urban and regional South Australia. Analysis reveals differences across groups of employers based on their previous hiring behaviour. Communication from employment support agencies should specifically address concerns of non-hirers and light hirers. Long-term financial concerns present strong but surmountable barriers to light hirers employing disabled people. Policy mitigating long-term employer concerns could attract employers to hire disabled people for the first time (non-hirers) or return to hiring (light hirers) disabled people. Negative employers (antagonists) and employers already sustaining ongoing workplace relationships with disabled people (loyals) have insurmountable reasons to not hire any (or more) disabled people and should not be targeted.

Accounts of employment experience with Hepatitis C (HCV) are scarce, particularly within a UK context where few qualitative studies are available. This article reports on a piece of empirical work which sought to explore the experiences of living with HCV in the UK, out of which the experience of employment emerged. Two standout areas of discussion in this article are the degree to which individuals felt protected in disability legislation (i.e. the Disability Discrimination Act, 1995, 2005, now part of the Equality Act 2010) and their experiences of receiving reasonable adjustments in the workplace. This research highlights the apparent lack of acknowledgement that HCV can affect employment and indeed that the difficulties faced by those with HCV are shared by other disabled people. The findings here suggest that where workplaces facilitate or allow reasonable adjustments employees were able to take up the potential that allowed them to work in sustainable ways.

This article aims to account for why the redistributive effect of the Korean welfare state remains meagre. Given the fact that its small size is already a well-known factor, it directs its attention to the design and structural features of key social provisions and their distributional profile. Its findings suggest that the design features of social provisions are progressive but their distributional profiles are not. This is because there are other factors that undermine the seemingly progressive design of the welfare system in Korea. The article argues that in order to establish a fair and efficient welfare state, it is not only any increase in size that is important but also correction of the factors that diminish the progressivity of the welfare system.

This article examines the theoretical underpinning of living wage campaigns. The article uses evidence, derived from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey from 2005 to 2008, to examine the extent to which a living wage will address low pay within the labour force. We highlight the greater incidence of low pay within the private sector and then focus upon the public sector where the living wage demand has had most impact. The article builds upon the results from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey with analysis of the British Household Panel Survey in 2007 in order to examine the impact that the introduction of a living wage, within the public sector, would have in reducing household inequality.

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the relationship between work and ageing has become increasingly visible as a policy issue. It is both reflected in and influenced by changes in macro-economic policy, life-opportunities and social attitudes associated with growing older, as a combination of falling birth rates and increased longevity, and has put pressure on the traditional parameters of the working age. The idea of retiring at a fixed point in the life-course, to enjoy a period of rest or leisure at the end of a working life, emerged in many advanced economies during the 1900s and evolved into policies that encouraged early retirement as the baby-boomers entered the jobs market in the 1960s and 1970s (Phillipson and Smith, 2005). Early retirement, itself a relatively recent development, gave rise to the possibility of a ‘third age’ of leisure and active ageing (Laslett, 1987), but as demographic and economic changes make themselves felt, it is again becoming an uncertain prospect for many older workers (Biggs and McGann, 2015).

This article draws on Ahmed's (2004) concept of affective economies as a means of critically exploring the nature and consequences of the ‘business case for mature aged workers’: a framework that underpins recent government and corporate policy focusing on extending working lives. Contra to the claims of the business case as wholly rationalistic ‘common sense’ and logical, the article argues that the business case operates discursively by drawing on latent but potent circuits of emotionality. Drawing on a range of government ‘best practice’ resources for employers, we show how the ‘rippling effects’ of emotionality result in particular systems of valuation pertaining to mature aged workers and later life working. In situating these dynamics as important to a broader affective political economy, we argue this may inadvertently undermine current initiatives seeking to promote the retention and recruitment of mature aged workers.

A major theme within social gerontology is how retirement ‘is being re-organised, if not undone’. Institutional supports for retirement are weakening, with pension ages rising in many countries. Increasing numbers of older workers are working past traditional retirement age on a part-time or self-employed basis, and a growing minority are joining the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Drawing upon narrative interviews with older Australians who are involuntarily non-employed or underemployed, this article explores how the ‘unravelling’ of retirement is experienced by a group of older workers on the periphery of the labour market. While policy makers hope that higher pension ages will lead to a longer period of working life, the risk is that older workers, especially those experiencing chronic insecurity in the labour market, will be caught in a netherworld between work and retirement.

This paper critically examines the development of recent policy and theoretical issues concerning the ‘extension of working lives’ for older people in the United Kingdom. It grounds its analysis in ideas from the ‘risk society’ thesis (Beck, 1992) to explore how the matrix of population ageing, job and pension changes impinge on the shifting emphasis on increasing the retirement age, coupled with individualising pensions from state provision to a focus on self-responsibility via private provision. This neo-liberal re-positioning of extending work and pension policy has implications for the management of risk for older people in the UK. The paper explores the impact of population ageing on government ideas associated with social policy relating to extending working lives. It concludes with an assessment on the lessons policy makers and social policy analysts can learn from such shifts and the impact on the social construction of age.

The number of mature-age Australians registered with employment services is growing, with mature-age jobseekers spending longer unemployed and on income support than younger jobseekers. However, the role of employment services in extending working lives has so far received little attention in policy discourses on ageing and employment. This article examines the effectiveness of Australia's employment services system in supporting mature-age jobseekers, drawing upon interviews conducted as part of wider research on unemployment and underemployment in mature-age. We find that the overriding experience among mature-age jobseekers’ is of a system that exudes ‘carelessness’. We situate mature-age jobseekers’ experiences of systemic carelessness within the context of wider welfare reforms that have contributed to the de-professionalisation and routinisation of employment services’ delivery.

The notion of building welfare around work poses fresh challenges from a life-course perspective, where the situation of older workers has largely been neglected by policymakers committed to the ‘social investment perspective’ – typically constructed as a policy paradigm for ‘human capital’ development in children and young adults (Esping-Andersen, 2002). This article seeks to re-focus attention on the policy challenges relating to the needs of older workers within the new ‘inclusive growth’ agendas that seek to advance equitable opportunities for all. Social investment policies pose a range of issues and challenges for ageing populations that are discussed and examined in detail in this article. If social investment policy is to succeed in ageing OECD societies, it will mean broadening the investment perspective to include the (neglected) education and training needs of older workers to ensure that everyone can contribute to and share in economic prosperity.

The roles that older workers play in labour markets has received a great deal of policy and academic scrutiny in response to economic crises and demographic change. As a starting point, this focus has paradoxically resulted in insufficient attention to older workers themselves. The article is thus concerned with refocusing the agenda for research onto the older worker. Building on an extensive literature review, four gaps in knowledge are identified: who might be researched; what the focus of that research might be; the role of theory informing the research; and how the research might be conducted. The article identifies a particular need for research on ‘work’ as opposed to ‘retirement’ and how the changing nature of work may influence future patterns of later life labour market engagement and retirement. It is argued that better public policy will result from more critical and socially embedded research that recognises the heterogeneity of ‘older workers’ and their motivations.

Issues related to population ageing and longer working lives span diverse research areas and are linked to a number of conceptual and policy debates. Here we provide details of texts which allow quick access to key debates in the different domains covered by the contributions. We focus first on social policy, retirement and pensions. We then provide key sources on the changing experiences and perceptions of retirement; age-discrimination, human resource management and older workers; and early exit, mature-age unemployment and activating older workers.