Archive for 24/03/2009

European Age Discrimination – “it’s a getting old thing…………..”!

24/03/2009 by admin.

Simone reports……… 

Is the UK Age Discrimination legislation unlawful?  Age Concern think so…….. they are currently challenging the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006 on two fronts.  They believe Regulation 30, which permits employers to compulsory retire employees at age 65, is contrary to the EC Equal Treatment Directive and that the circumstances in which direct age discrimination can be justified, have been drafted too widely. Recently, Age Concern’s challenge won an important victory in the European Court of Justice (ECJ).  It ruled that the:

“UK can have forced retirement legislation but only if UK Government is able to justify such a policy. 

We’ll await with interest the High Court’s ruling later this year on whether the

UK’s default retirement age is justified and whether regulation 3(1) of the Age Regulations is compatible with EU law.

Whatever happens there will be some interesting ricochets for employers……

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So you need more orders?

24/03/2009 by Geoff.

We’ve referred to the need to deal with getting more orders / customers (the external constraint) in previous blog entries. But how to do it?

There are over 65,000 business owners out there so its not that there isn’t opportunity!

In our experience companies have a fairly static group of customers who use their products or services. The problem is that companies don’t go outside this comfort zone so if their customers demand goes down then so does the performance of their business.

We would suggest companies who want to break out of this circle and be successful look at the following:

  • What resources has the company got? 
  • What else can these resources be used to make or service?
  • Which markets might the resources, new products, new services satisfy a need in?

Tackling the problem in this way might just generate more orders!

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