Originally Posted by
Juan Tugoh
People here are forgetting that there are two issues here. Retirement through loss of licence, ie no licence no job, and retirement from mandatory retirement age from a company. Case law has already been made within the UK to make a precedent about a company forcing an age related retirement age. So it maybe you can keep your licence beyond 65 but it is a different case as to whether a company can retire you from the company at an age. Law suggests the second is okay, in fact it’s been up to the Supreme Court already. It maybe that you can maintain a licence longer but that doesn’t mean you stay at the top of the seniority ladder with your nose in the trough.
If you are alluding to
the Seldon case I think you are being way over simplistic in your conclusions. There's a world of difference between regularly measuring pilot competence and health, and having no devices so clearly industry standardised worldwide as those used to identify deteriorating professional pilots, that could be used to objectively trim out dead wood in other industries.
Seldon was a partner in a modest legal firm not a commercial pilot. He may or may not have been dead wood. He wasn't tested. For reasons of dignity (perhaps), no tests exist that might have identified deterioration in his performance or continuing suitability to remain as a partner at his firm (and probably the same is true at most other legal firms). Else, as I think was alternatively put by the Respondent, he was scheduled to be culled (my words) for reasons of acceptable intergenerational fairness (perhaps), at an age that Seldon himself had perhaps been involved in agreeing as one of the partners who decided some years previously before age discrimination and now equality law had been fully developed.
In the particular case, it was supposedly judged that either of the above aims would be a legitimate aim
in the particular case but only if it could be shown that one of those legitimate aims was actually being pursued rather than something less defined that was not objectively justified as a legitimate aim. I think it was sent back to the lower court for that to be decided - I am not sure about that but I don't think it matters in contrast to the pilot case where objectivity pervades constantly.. There is a world of difference between objectivity in different industries and it couldn't be much more stark than between professional lawyering and professional flying. I took it that the judges in the Seldon case warned as much in summary:
"All businesses will now have to give careful consideration to what, if any, mandatory retirement rules can be justified".
I submit that the more astute amongst us will put primary emphasis on the two words "if any" and deduce from that that many if not most mandatory retirement ages are unlawful, rather than just a few, and even if it is just a few, mandatory retirement ages for commercial pilots will be amongst the most likely to be unlawful because of what we know is different about the controlled measureable environment around the role compared to any other job. DIgnity cannot be used in the pilot case as it is always a red herring when facts of regular industry standard tests speak for themselves. Intergenerational fairness is a joke and I think only got a hearing because the judges were over familiar with such feelings through their own experience and somehow falsely translated it to also being a state sponsored social policy. By the time most of us reach retirement, we've almost lost count of all the firms we worked for. Intergenerational fairness means all things to all men or women so I fail to understand why judges think they are on to something rational in trying to judge it as a useful concept let alone a legitimate aim, especially when trying to test it against accepted state sponsored social policy. It's as daft as insisting Brexit always means Brexit and by the way yes its what the people voted for (I reckon
).