An interesting post on ING's new eZonomics blog points the reader to a new study on older workers and health.  The findings -- as reported in The Lancet -- don't at first glance look terribly surprising:

A poor work environment and health complaints before retirement were associated with a steeper yearly increase in the prevalence of suboptimum health while still in work, and a greater retirement-related improvement; however, people with a combination of high occupational grade, low demands, and high satisfaction at work showed no such retirement-related improvement.

In simple terms, this is saying that if a worker is happy, their health is better. Anyone who has ever had a bad job could have told them that! But the study, of course takes it further.

Working life for older workers needs to be redesigned to achieve higher labour-market participation.

This has broad implications, given the trend away from final salary pensions and the general view that workers are going to have to work longer than in previous generations. Companies that are faced with workers who cannot easily retire because of a lack of pension savings, that need people to work longer  and that are subject to increasing anti-age discrimination will need to take the employment needs of older employees on board.

It may not be easy. As the ING post points out, the OECD looks at the issue in a 2006 report entitled "Live Longer, Work Longer". It began its report:

In an era of rapid population ageing, many employment and social policies, practices and attitudes that discourage work at an older age have passed their sell-by date and need to be overhauled. They not only deny older workers choice about when and how to retire but are costly for business, the economy and society.

Then comes the recommendations:

-- There must be strong financial incentives to carry on working and existing, subsidised pathways to early retirement have to be eliminated.
-- Wage-setting and employment practices must be adapted to ensure that employers have stronger incentives to hire and retain older workers.
-- Older workers must be given appropriate help and encouragement to improve their employability.
-- A major shift in attitudes to working at an older age will be required on the part of both employers and older workers themselves

Is any of this being done?

Tipping just got more complicated — or did it?

Under new legislation, employers will no longer be able to use tips and service charges to make up the minimum wage salaries of its workers.

However, employers are not obligated to share the money they earn on service charges added to bills with their employees.

Service staff will be able to supplement wages with tips, but will have to declare them as earnings and pay extra National Insurance.

While restaurants will have to decide how they approach service charges, it will still be up to the customer to decide if they want to tip and how much.

In North America, tipping is a common cultural practice. A customer who doesn’t tip is spurned and most non-unionized service staff rely on tips to make up the bulk of their income. Tipping is seen as an incentive to workers for generating efficient service.

Do you think people will tip in Britain if it is voluntary? Do you think service in restaurants, bars and hotels would improve if tipping were commonplace?

A small but growing number of companies are considering asking their workers to take a pay cut as a means of cutting costs without having to fire anyone.

In the latest example, three unions representing steelworkers at Corus have offered to take a 10 percent cut across the company’s entire UK workforce of 25,000 for six months in an attempt to save one of the last remaining steel factories in Britain — the plant at Llanwern in Newport, South Wales.

The steelmaking part of Llanwern was shut in 2001 with 1,300 redundancies but the site still makes steel sheets and employs more than 1,000 people.

India’s Tata Group, which bought the Anglo-Dutch company last year, has said it wants to cut costs by 350 million pounds in both the UK and the Netherlands as it cuts production by 30 percent.

Other possible solutions include cutting employees’ working hours. Corus in the Netherlands, for example, is asking 6,400 workers to each work one day less perweek for six weeks — the equivalent of cutting 1,100 full-time jobs.

In another example, engineering firm JCB has managed to limit job losses after the GMB union agreed to accept a shorter and lower-paid working week

As the downturn bites and announcements of  huge job losses become a daily event, do you think such solutions are the answer. Would you take a pay cut? Or is there an element here of employers using the dire economic situation to extract unfair concessions from their workforces?