From Ageism to Age Equality: Addressing the Challenges ...

necessary to promote awareness of it in order to affect a culture change among employers,employees and the wider community. Finally, support services (information, advice and legalsupport) are needed to ensure that individuals can benefit from their new rights and employers canchange their policies and procedures to enable them to act in an age-neutral way. The mechanismsfor delivering these support services may be formal bodies funded by government but informationmust also be embedded in wider society within NGOs, the media and other organisations.AGE is monitoring the progress made by governments in delivering on these tasks. In December2003, the implementation date for the Directive, we presented a report to the European Parliamentsummarising our review of progress made: we found progress to be inadequate.Four governments, including the Irish Government, reported complete transposition by the deadline.Three had formally requested extensions. Of the other eight, some were making progress but hadneglected to request an extension. Others had made no progress; this group included the GermanGovernment whose Chancellor was publicly unenthusiastic.Of the four who had reported transposition, AGE was sceptical about the approaches of the Frenchand Italian Governments. Their approaches involved a technical transposition of labour laws withoutthe wider processes of engagement and raising of awareness required by the Directive.60Among those who failed to transpose or inform the Commission on time, we observed interestingdevelopments. In Belgium and Sweden, for example, governments were looking at broaderapproaches than the simple transposition of the Directive. As in Ireland, the proposed Belgianlegislation, which is now in place but delayed until 2006, deals with goods, facilities and services aswell as employment.AGE will publish a further report in December 2004 updating its assessment of the 15 old MemberStates and reporting for the first time on the ten new Member States. Also in December 2004 we willpublish a report on age discrimination beyond employment. While the EU agenda does not extendinto this area, at least on the age ground, we are familiar with the experiences of older people withwhom we work. They tell us, for example, about discrimination in healthcare, the insurance industryand the media. We are aware that outside Europe, in the USA, Canada and Australia, legislationexists in these areas. In its recent Green Paper on the future of equality action, the EuropeanCommission was cautious in its proposals for further work on these broader age issues,acknowledging the issues but proposing to focus on the Framework Employment Directive. While thismay reflect political realities, we believe that it is right that European institutions, at the very least,build the evidence base about real people’s experiences. A failure to do so would suggest that notonly have we yet to address underlying discriminatory attitudes against people on the grounds ofage but that we are also unwilling to include older people fully in European society.ConclusionsIf our society is willing to continue to allow discrimination on the grounds of age, it is a strongindication that we have yet to come to terms with our changing demography. Older people will becritical to the economic and social development of Europe, as consumers, contributors and citizens.Conference Proceedings