Abstract
This article examines intergenerational justice from a legal perspective by focusing on employment regulation and by addressing a preliminary question: how the legally relevant category of the ‘older worker’ is constructed in legal systems in which age operates both as a protected ground and as a recurrent regulatory criterion. Within the EU multilevel framework, the analysis draws on Directive 2000/78/EC - particularly Article 6 - and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union to show that EU equality law does not establish a single, fixed age marker for identifying who qualifies as an older worker, but instead bases age-based differentiation around justification requirements and structured proportionality review. Building on this premise, the article turns to Italy as a case study, reconstructing the statutory age criteria and eligibility conditions through which labour and social security rules allocate opportunities, duties and protection, and shape pathways of retention and exit across the working life cycle. Intergenerational justice is understood here as fairness between age groups coexisting in the workforce. The core question is whether the resulting regulatory architecture produces a balanced allocation of opportunities, burdens and protections across age positions, not only in distributive terms, but also in terms of relational equality and the legal conditions for quality work across the life course. In this sense, the article argues that intergenerational balance cannot be inferred from resource distribution alone, since working conditions and legal entitlements may enable or constrain longer working lives and shape older workers’ willingness and capacity to remain in employment. On this basis, the article seeks to clarify the legal notion of the ‘older worker’, with two main objectives: first, to use it as an analytical lens through which to assess age-based regulation in labour law; and second, to frame it as a category that may be necessary for shaping a more balanced regulation of the labour market and the employment relationship in light of the changing age composition of the workforce.
Keywords
Premise: Population ageing and intergenerational justice questions
Population ageing is reshaping European labour markets and is testing the extent to which employment regulation can balance, over the medium to long term, fairness and turnover across coexisting age groups. 1 Rising life expectancy, 2 declining birth rates 3 and large cohorts approaching retirement have increased the number of older people in employment. 4 In the EU, the employment rate of persons aged 55–64 rose from 38.4% in 2002 to 60.5% in 2022, 5 reflecting policies aimed at extending working lives and fostering workplaces in which multiple age groups coexist for longer. 6
This transformation brings to the forefront specific intergenerational tensions in access, retention and mobility within employment: for instance, (i) policies encouraging longer careers may reduce immediate turnover opportunities; (ii) hiring incentives targeted at some age brackets may reallocate opportunities away from others; (iii) rules around retirement transitions may facilitate generational turnover but also risk pushing older workers out; and (iv) rapid technological and organisational change may widen gaps in training and reskilling across the life course. At the same time, vulnerabilities appear at both ends of the working life cycle: younger workers often face precariousness and wage stagnation, whereas older workers are increasingly expected to remain employable in rapidly changing workplaces. 7
In this context, from a legal perspective intergenerational justice becomes a crucial analytical lens. While economists and social scientists have extensively explored intergenerational justice - primarily as a distributive issue concerning present and future generations 8 - the legal perspective has remained comparatively underdeveloped. 9 In particular, justice among coexisting generations (i.e., between different generational groups living at the same time) has received limited attention from legal scholars and in legal debates, 10 despite its immediate relevance to welfare state redesign in ageing societies. 11 Only recently has legal research begun to address these issues, often indirectly, by examining how legal frameworks shape intergenerational relations. 12
A closer look at employment regulation, however, shows that age is routinely mobilised as a regulatory parameter, well beyond legal questions. 13 It shapes access to opportunities (including hiring incentives), the distribution of job security and protection, the allocation of training and reskilling, and the rules governing retirement transitions and turnover. These issues are not only distributive. They also affect inclusion, social status and equal standing at work across the life span; concerns that remain central regardless of whether employment law is classified as ‘social law’, i.e., as a field aimed at securing social protection and promoting social justice. 14
Objectives, scope and conceptual clarifications
This article examines how EU employment equality law and national labour regulation construct the legally relevant figure of the ‘older worker’ in an ageing workforce, and why that construction matters for assessing whether (and in what ways) labour law embeds intergenerational justice.
Age-related provisions are dispersed across employment, labour market and social security regimes, and they operate both through explicit thresholds and through de facto cohort effects. The first methodological task, therefore, is to render age-related regulatory choices observable and comparable. Since the ‘older worker’ is not a legally predefined category, 15 the article aims to develop an age-based taxonomy as an analytical legal framework for organising dispersed age-related provisions into comparable legal positions. Its purpose is not to impose rigid sociological labels on the workforce, but to demonstrate how labour law uses age to allocate rights, duties, protections and exit or retention pathways across the working life cycle.
As a first step, it is useful to clarify that ‘ageing’ is not synonymous with ‘old age’, and ‘older worker’ should not be confused with ‘elderly’ or with ‘retired/retiring’ worker. In employment law, individuals may be classified as ‘older workers’ for regulatory purposes even before they fall within the broader category of ‘older citizens’, 16 although the two may partially overlap from a regulatory standpoint. 17
Across European legal systems, some institutional benchmarks provide useful anchors. 18 Retirement age (albeit variable) often represents the culminating point of rules that differentiate later working-life stages from other cohorts who are still employed. By contrast, the starting point (i.e., when a worker becomes ‘older’ in legally relevant terms) is far more difficult to pinpoint, not least because ‘old age’ is relative and context-dependent. Statistical reporting frequently focuses on the last cohort of the workforce (typically from the age of 55 up to retirement), 19 while policy-oriented and empirical studies sometimes adopt earlier thresholds (50+, and in some cases 40+), 20 depending on the risk or instrument at stake. As explained by the World Health Organization, the physical and mental changes associated with ageing are decisive in determining the ability to work of individuals aged 45 or above, referred to as ‘ageing workers’, and of those aged 55 or above, referred to as ‘aged workers’. 21
On the basis of these premises, the analysis proceeds in two steps. First, it examines the EU framework, where age operates both as a protected and as a recurrent regulatory parameter, structured through Article 6 of Directive 2000/78/EC and proportionality review carried out by the European Court of Justice. Second, it turns to Italy (an EU Member State heavily affected by demographic ageing) 22 as a case study showing how domestic law attaches institution-specific legal effects to age and proximity to retirement, across different regulatory domains.
The central point is not that a worker becomes ‘older’ at any single predetermined age, but that the category of the ‘older worker’ is legally constructed through functional and regime-specific criteria, particularly those related to employability and proximity to retirement. These visible criteria enable, across regulatory fields and over time, both a proportionality review under the EU equality framework and an analysis of how rules distribute rights and opportunities across age groups, thereby providing a basis for a broader legal assessment of intergenerational justice.
From a normative perspective, the article adopts a relational-egalitarian understanding of intergenerational justice: 23 the relevant question is not whether there are equal outcomes as such, but whether regulatory choices sustain relations of equal standing across working life stages, including a securing of continued inclusion for workers who may be disadvantaged by age. Accordingly, ‘intergenerational justice’ is used operationally to show fairness between coexisting age groups within the same time period (i.e., among living generations in the workforce), even where the literature would label similar issues as ‘intragenerational’. 24
Having identified the legal coordinates of the ‘older worker’, the article maps age-relevant rules across cohorts and outlines indicators for an intergenerational justice index in employment law, capable of tracking how regulation allocates opportunities, protection, and the conditions for quality work across the working life cycle, 25 including in the transition to retirement. 26
The choice to treat ‘generations’ as age groups rather than birth cohorts follows the distinction between cohorts (fixed membership) and age classes (a position in the life cycle), which is crucial when the object of comparison concerns contemporaneous relations and power structures among working cohorts and is also consistent with the operational choices made in some existing intergenerational justice indices. 27 Moreover, beyond being a criterion already adopted in several existing indices, when observed over time age group comparisons can also help detect patterns of indirect, cohort-based injustice. 28
The European multilevel framework and the ECJ's functional construction of the ‘older worker’
In the European debate, age in employment is framed within a multilevel structure that EU law keeps distinct. One dimension is non-discrimination: age is a protected ground and therefore cannot justify detrimental treatment. Another is labour market regulation: age may be used as a functional criterion to identify a person's position within the working life cycle, for example in relation to employability risks, proximity to pension entitlement, and priority setting within activation policies.
EU law therefore does not exclude this second use of age but constrains it: it makes the distributive and status effects of age thresholds legally reviewable, requiring that they be justified and proportionate. The analysis centres on Directive 2000/78/EC, especially Article 6, which permits age-based differences of treatment only where they pursue legitimate aims and satisfy the structured proportionality test applied by the Court of Justice. Scholarship has observed that the Court's jurisprudence on age is less concerned with validating particular numerical cut-offs than with shaping the conditions under which age may be relied upon as a regulatory variable within the Directive's framework. 29 This is apparent in the Court's insistence (particularly in litigation under Article 6) on aims that are sufficiently determinate to be reviewed, on a plausible connection between the threshold and the stated objective, on a focus on less discriminatory alternatives, and on coherence within the wider regulatory setting. 30 The Court is also wary of designs that attach automatic effects to age, or to pension eligibility, regardless of the worker's actual capacity or willingness to remain in employment. 31
In this context, EU law does not establish the ‘older worker’ within a single age threshold. What emerges is an operational, range-based understanding. Age becomes legally important at specific points in the career, depending on the function it performs and on the corresponding intensity of proportionality review. For analytical purposes, this can be reconstructed around three clusters that track distinct phases of the working life cycle and serve as operational reference points rather than as normative or exhaustive legal categories.
A first cluster concerns employability-oriented measures, where age is used to address potential labour market disadvantage rather than to signal exit from work. Member States may use age thresholds to target retention, reintegration, adaptation, or training measures, but the cut-offs must remain closely connected to the stated objective and remain subject to proportionality review. 32 The case Werner Mangold v Rüdiger Helm remains paradigmatic of the risks of blanket age proxies. A rule allowing fixed-term contracts without objective justification once a worker had reached the age of 52 was held to exceed what was appropriate and necessary, 33 as it exposed a broad, age-defined group to heightened structural precariousness through an automatic derogation insufficiently tailored to the stated employment policy objective. 34 Comparable discipline applies where age differentiation is embedded in pay, seniority or access regimes, and where contractual techniques attach automatic effects to age thresholds. 35
A second cluster concerns the transition to retirement. Here, the legally salient marker is not ‘old age’ in a sociological sense, but proximity to, or attainment of, statutory pension age and the related entitlement to pension benefits. In this phase the Court has accepted mandatory retirement techniques (typically around the age of 65 or, in some systems, 67) as instruments of labour market planning and intergenerational turnover, while subjecting them to Article 6 scrutiny and structured proportionality review. 36 Part of the literature has cautioned that, in this line of case law, proportionality review may remain relatively deferential and offer only limited guidance as to the factors that should concretely inform the assessment, to the point that it may be sufficient that a Member State ‘could reasonably be entitled to take that view’. 37 The same systemic perspective extends to age ceilings linked to organisational or safety rationales, where the justificatory track and the calibration of the threshold are decisive. 38 The Court has also held that eligibility for a pension is not, in itself, a conclusive indicator of effective labour market exit, particularly where employment-related advantages are withheld solely because the worker could claim a pension. 39
A third cluster concerns workers who have reached statutory pension age but remain in paid work. This group is legally distinctive because the statutory retirement threshold has been reached while the employment relationship continues, raising significant questions about the purpose and proportionality of age-linked rules. EU law does not treat this group as falling outside the scope of employment equality. It occupies a sensitive borderline position between employment and retirement. In this setting, differential treatment remains permissible only insofar as it coherently pursues labour market, organisational, or, where appropriate, safety-related objectives and satisfies proportionality requirements. 40 This phase also illustrates how age thresholds may intersect with other protected vulnerabilities, reinforcing the need to focus on concrete exclusionary and relational effects (concerning inclusion, recognition and exposure to risk) rather than on abstract assumptions tied to chronological age. 41
The interpretative framework developed by the European Court of Justice on age as a protected ground is complemented by EU policy and soft-law instruments, which avoid a rigid definition of the ‘older worker’ but help to typify the relevant problem space. This includes the active ageing agenda and the symbolic programme of the 2012 European Year. 42 It also includes the Commission's Green Paper on Ageing (COM(2021) 50) and the European Pillar of Social Rights, notably on education, training and lifelong learning, 43 as well as EU-level initiatives on upskilling, reskilling and skills validation. 44
Taken together, these strands confirm that EU equality law constructs the ‘older worker’ not as a homogeneous group defined by a fixed age, but as a sequence of legally differentiated positions within the working life cycle. For analytical and measurement purposes, the decisive variable is not the numerical threshold as such, but whether the threshold is embedded in a coherent regulatory logic and equipped with safeguards capable of mitigating discriminatory effects, especially where normative choices risk converting retirement proximity into compulsory exit. In this setting, focusing on non-discrimination alone may be structurally insufficient to understand the exclusionary and status effects produced by age-based differentiation in labour regulation. As has been observed, intergenerational justifications and mandatory retirement techniques may otherwise operate with a tendency towards automatism, with limited scrutiny of the underlying assumptions and, crucially, of their concrete implications for intergenerational balance and justice. 45
From age thresholds to categories: Constructing a legal taxonomy of workers on the basis of age (Italy as a case study)
As noted above, the EU framework does not establish a single age cut-off for the ‘older worker’; rather, it disciplines the use of age as a regulatory criterion through Article 6 of Directive 2000/78/EC and a stringent proportionality and coherence review. Precisely because EU law provides parameters rather than a uniform threshold, the intergenerational implications of age-differentiated regulation become observable only once those parameters are translated, through concrete national choices, into the specific age and retirement proximity benchmarks via which domestic rules allocate opportunities, protections, duties and exit/retention pathways across the working life cycle. This makes the analysis and, above all, the measurement of intergenerational justice in employment law methodologically demanding. It requires mapping and classifying dispersed age-related provisions across labour, labour market and social security regimes in order to reconstruct comparable worker categories.
Italy offers a particularly instructive case study because demographic ageing and repeated reforms of retirement and labour market rules make age a salient regulatory marker across employment and social security law. 46
In short, although age is a dynamic attribute that evolves over time, it is routinely treated as a regulatory criterion in relation to structuring labour markets and to managing welfare systems, and, more occasionally, to determining the legal regime governing employment relationships. Employment law is therefore a privileged area to assess whether and how intergenerational justice is reflected in rules shaping both labour market participation and employment relations, particularly as most Member States continue to raise the statutory retirement age. 47
In this context, the aim is to examine whether Italian employment regulation incorporates intergenerational justice considerations and whether a workable balance of regulatory fairness between age groups can be identified, with a view to informing legislative choices. 48
First, the analysis turns to labour market measures that operate through proactive policies in which age serves as a relevant criterion, such as employment support and upskilling schemes for unemployed workers aged 50 and over. 49 Other measures, in addition to facilitating the employment of certain individuals (selected based on their age) by businesses, envisage more flexible employment models by allowing certain types of contracts. This was the case, e.g., when it was possible for employers to enter into entry-level contracts with employees aged under 29, or 50 or above, a provision that has since been repealed. 50 It is partly the case today when it comes to fixed-term contracts, which may derogate from the applicable quantitative limits when they concern workers who are 55 years of age or above. 51 Finally, it is certainly the case when it comes to intermittent employment contracts, under which workers must be aged under 24 or 55 or above. 52
Age is also significant with regard to dismissals: 53 (a) in the case of individual dismissals, workers may be freely dismissed when they reach the retirement age; 54 whereas (b) in the case of collective dismissals, age requirements are only vaguely referred to by the legislator. 55
The same applies to laws on health and safety at work, 56 which take age into account in a few specific cases. 57 That said, Law Decree 29/2024 classifies the elderly as individuals who are aged 65 or above, 58 and makes specific reference to risk assessment criteria, which increasingly focus on age 59 and, accordingly, the work-life balance of older employees, who appear to be guaranteed a right to flexible work arrangements. 60
Age requirements can also be gatekeepers for access to employment in the private and public sectors, 61 especially in law enforcement, where the retirement age is significantly lower than that envisaged for the general workforce. 62
Collective bargaining agreements also include provisions that consider age relevant in certain cases, e.g., workplace transfers, 63 and the criteria to calculate allowances (including statutory end-of-service benefit and notice period) in employment relationships that concern managers. 64
Indeed, if one were to briefly analyse the above provisions, employment law would appear to be the area of law that is most accustomed to rules that take age into account. This makes it possible to posit an age group made up of older workers, which does not include workers that could be classified as young or ‘age-neutral’, 65 with a view to laying the foundation for an intergenerational justice index.
A parallel issue concerns the identification of ‘young workers’. Here too, the article adopts an operational threshold, acknowledging that youth-related measures vary across Member States and even within national systems. For the purposes of the proposed taxonomy (and of the index built on it), ‘young workers’ are therefore defined as those who have reached legal working age 66 and are no older than 35. This cut-off is used as a conventional policy marker to delimit the early working life stage typically associated with entry trajectories and youth-targeted labour market measures, rather than as a claim about a fixed legal category.
Methodologically, the thresholds adopted below are not presented as a universal definition, but as a measurement-oriented reference standard derived from mapping and classifying age-based criteria embedded in statutory rules, policy instruments and collective bargaining provisions (e.g., eligibility conditions, derogations and targeted duties). These age thresholds are selected on the basis of the recurrence and legal salience of the underlying criteria across the Italian framework, while remaining compatible with the context-sensitive logic highlighted by EU law. The same approach is also consistent with EU-level policy framing, which has repeatedly identified individuals aged 50 and over as a relevant target group for increasing labour market participation through active ageing measures focused on new forms of work organisation and lifelong learning.
If working age individuals are differentiated by age range, also accounting for the length and legal structure of working life, ‘older workers’ may be operationally described as employees or job seekers aged between 50 and the statutory retirement age. 67
The lower cut-off (50) is used as a conservative legal policy benchmark recurring in activation/reintegration measures, while the retirement age operates as the legally salient upper boundary of the retirement transition. As observed, ‘young workers’ may be operationally described as persons who have reached legal working age and are no older than 35. Alternative cut-offs (e.g., 55+) can be tested as sensitivity checks without altering the age-based classification scheme. 68
‘Mature workers’ are placed in between (36–49), as workers in their physical, cognitive and professional prime who, as a rule, do not require targeted measures to be well positioned in the labour market and in employment relationships. 69
This taxonomy is intended to maximise comparability across heterogeneous age-related provisions, while remaining sensitive to the context-dependence of thresholds highlighted in EU case law and national regulation.
Regulatory dimensions and candidate indicators: A framework for the Italian case
On the basis of the age-based legal taxonomy proposed here, the contribution moves from classification to measurement by identifying the regulatory domains in which age differentiation is legally structured and can therefore be formulated as candidate indicators. In this perspective, the next step is to identify the regulatory dimensions through which employment law and labour market regulation may affect generational balance. These dimensions provide the building blocks from which indicators can be derived for the proposed measurement system.
A first regulatory area from which indicators can be extrapolated concerns incentive-based measures, including national and regional incentives for specific age groups (e.g., social security relief and tax relief for employers hiring categories of young or older workers) 70 as well as incentives supporting training schemes targeting unemployed persons in defined age ranges. 71
A second area concerns rules governing the use of public resources to promote self-employment (for young and older people alike), especially where access is conditional - directly or indirectly - on age. 72
A third area covers welfare-oriented measures on training and upskilling (particularly for older workers facing a higher risk of professional obsolescence) and income guarantees during job transitions. 73
The analysis then turns to domains in which different rules apply to employment relationships based on age requirements, reflecting the increasing legal prominence of population ageing and the ageing workforce in legislative wording and regulatory design. 74 In this context, mandatory provisions (including those under collective bargaining) that limit employers’ managerial powers or impose duties in favour of specific categories of workers, as well as measures encouraging organisational arrangements based on employees’ ages, are relevant.
In theorising the index, reference can therefore be made to indicators concerning: (a) training; (b) upskilling; (c) recruitment and redeployment incentives, including those aimed at reducing the generational gap; and (d) access to certain professions or public competitions. More specifically, age becomes relevant in relation to: (e) individual and collective dismissals; (f) the manner in which work is performed (e.g., remote working); (g) protection of professional status (understood as safeguarding workers’ skills and job classification/level); (h) working hours; (i) contract type; (j) determination/choice of workplace; (k) duties; (l) remuneration policies; (m) health and safety in the workplace; and, lastly, (n) guarantees linked to the relationship between ‘disability’ and ‘age’ (as recently established by law), 75 which may justify reasonable accommodations. 76
At the same time, a comprehensive list of indicators affecting the social conditions of people of working age requires multiple scientific competences and an inclusive approach that considers groups at risk of social exclusion and also the organisations safeguarding their interests. 77 From this standpoint, particular weight should be given to measures aimed at ensuring quality of work, 78 which, for older people may entail different standards from that for younger cohorts in terms of health, wellbeing, and personal development. 79 On this basis, indicators may also be proposed that are not yet reflected in existing legislation and may therefore function as ‘warning signs’ prompting legislators and social partners to intervene through adequate rules.
Conclusion and prospects
The aim of this research was not to provide an immediately applicable system for measuring intergenerational justice, nor to discuss its philosophical foundations. Rather, its ambition was to examine whether, and how, labour regulation has made age a legally relevant criterion. It further sought to show how intergenerational balance may be observed and assessed from a specifically legal, and not merely distributive, perspective. From this perspective, the present proposal may be seen as an attempt to develop a framework that can also be read alongside the Active Ageing Index (AAI), 80 albeit with a different objective. Whereas the AAI mainly measures activation and participation outcomes for older age groups, the framework proposed here concerns the legal regulatory architecture as such. It is broader because it compares age-linked allocations across the whole working life cycle. At the same time, it is more circumscribed because it focuses specifically on labour law rules and on their distributive and relational effects.
By focusing on legal profiles, the analysis has shown that age occupies an intrinsically ambivalent and highly relevant position in labour law, to a much greater extent than in other areas of law. On the one hand, it operates as a protected ground within the anti-discrimination framework; on the other hand, it functions as a recurrent regulatory criterion through which labour regulation distributes rights, duties, protections and exit routes across the working life cycle. 81
At European Union level, the functional approach developed by the Court of Justice, while not providing a legal definition of the older worker, does not hinder its identification. 82 On the contrary, it helps reconstruct the category through recurring age-related regulatory thresholds and indicators connected to the worker's position in the course of his working life, including, but not limited to, proximity to retirement. Even so, the Court's structured proportionality review, centred on coherence and legislative design, is not sufficient to render the cross-generational effects of age-based rules fully assessable or empirically testable. This supports the need for a legally grounded framework capable of making such effects more visible.
If one turns to the Italian legal system, it can be observed that age-based rules are pervasive across labour law and social security. However, this remains a fragmented body of rules, often shaped by logics of the labour market exit or contingent production needs, rather than by a coherent strategy of inclusion throughout the working life. 83
This is particularly evident where the strong policy attention devoted to the entry of younger workers into the labour market is not matched, at the regulatory level, by an equivalent focus on the conditions needed to ensure sustainable, inclusive and good quality work throughout longer working lives. 84 Even the social partners, at least in Italy, 85 do not seem to have fully internalised the implications of a workforce whose age composition has profoundly changed. 86 ‘Young in/old out’ policies remain difficult to replace with more inclusive approaches 87 and continue to shape intergenerational dynamics in the workplace. More generally, the relationship between longer working lives and working conditions has not yet been adequately reconsidered, even though working conditions may either support or discourage continued labour market participation, and existing legal norms also affect older workers’ willingness to remain in work. In a context of demographic ageing and a declining inflow of younger workers, however, the promotion of sustainable longer working lives tends increasingly to become not merely a matter of inclusion or social protection, but also a structural condition for ensuring workforce continuity within firms.
Against this background, this analysis seeks to clarify the legal category of the older worker in order to assess how labour law, in its current state, allocates rights, prerogatives and protections across age groups. The point is not to assume that age-based differentiation is intrinsically fair or unfair, but to determine whether the combination of incentives, obligations, protections, derogations and exit or retention rules produced by legislation and collective bargaining results in a balanced arrangement in light of the different stages of working life.
Intergenerational justice, in this sense, cannot be inferred from distributive profiles alone, since relational equality, 88 in terms of inclusion, may diverge significantly from the picture that emerges when one considers only the distribution of economic resources. 89 This assessment may provide a basis, including an empirical one, for targeted adjustments in legislation, collective bargaining and, potentially, corporate policies.
This inevitably requires identifying categories of workers based on their age (an exercise that entails a degree of abstraction and generalisation). The resulting legal generalisation, namely, the decision to treat heterogeneous workers as a single category based on age, certainly entails a cost. Nonetheless, that cost can be understood as the counterpart of a regulatory rationalisation pursued in the general interest. It is in labour law, through the provisions of mandatory rules, that this mediation between individual protection and the pursuit of the collective interest finds its clearest expression. 90
Such an approach may lend itself to different practical applications, depending on the regulatory level considered. It may support the analysis of statutory law and the assessment of intergenerational balance within collective bargaining, initially focusing on national collective agreements. More broadly, it may help evaluate whether a given regulatory framework takes intergenerational tensions into account while ensuring good quality work throughout working life. This includes training and reskilling, work organisation, health and safety and transition measures, without turning age difference into exclusion and discrimination. 91
From this perspective, a measurable profile of age inclusion may also be relevant for corporate policies and strategies oriented towards environmental, social and governance goals. 92 It could make social rules and their intergenerational effects more observable and it could facilitate evidence-based regulatory adjustments.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was developed within the project funded by Next Generation EU - “Age-It - Ageing well in an ageing society” project (PE0000015 - CUP B43D22000720006), National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) - PE8 - Mission 4, C2, Intervention 1.3”. The views and opinions expressed are only those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.
