La fin de carrière dans une banque : politiques, pratiques, discours et vécu

Abstract

The Belgian government recently strengthened the conditions for early retirement, delaying the time of legal retirement of all workers, from 65 to 67 years old. These will consequently have to remain motivated, sufficiently trained and healthy, what lies on the shoulders of HRM professionals. This works aims to understand the impact of the policies of an institution on the end of the career of its workers. After having replaced this legal modification in the Belgian context, this work presents the different theories explaining the marginalization of older workers on the labor market. We successively present the economic, sociologic and psychological approaches. We than focus on some problems companies encounter because of the ageing workforce: loss of knowledge, disengagement, physical and mental strain and deskilling. This section also presents Taylor and Walker’s framework for analyzing the positioning of a company towards older workers management. Our third section introduces the evolutions of the bank sector, which saw changes in its economic (crisis), legal (Bale III), technological (digitalization) and competing (non-banking competitors) context. We than study the positioning of the four biggest banks active in Belgium, before focusing on the discourses, policies and practices of another bank (which will be our case study), and the experience of its workers’ end of career. We conclude that discourses, policies and practices must be distinguished. We also conclude that the bank, when offering attractive plans of early retirement, influences the destiny of some of its workers while not affecting others’. Human Resources Managers seem to have some of the keys of active ageing.