Tribune. From 45 years old in France, we are a senior, with all that that conveys and leads to received ideas. This term signifies the end of your career, the beginning of difficulties in changing jobs or finding one again and premature unemployment around the age of 55 with the virtual impossibility of leaving it before retirement. In fact, if the employment rate remains at 81% up to the age of 55, there is a free fall afterwards: 72% from 55 to 59 years old, 30% after 60 years.
What if we stopped calling workers over 45 “senior” and called them “experienced workers”?
The strangest thing is that there is no legal definition in this area: no legal text defines or specifies at what age one becomes “senior”. The cursor moves from one institution to another. According to INSEE, seniors are people over 65 years old. As for the administration, it considers that a person becomes senior at the age of 60 or 65 (65 for retirement, 60 for Social Security).
Indeed, it is from this age that certain aids reserved for “elderly” can be requested. Pôle emploi puts people 50 and over in the senior category. For the medical profession, one becomes a senior from the age of 70. While the World Health Organization (WHO) considers a person to be senior from the age of 60.
A marketing term
The term “senior” is, in fact, a marketing term that appeared in the 1990s to no longer stigmatize people over 60 as “old”. Today, we even speak of “silver” to qualify the category of over 60 years!
If the state, statistics and medicine consider that one is not a senior before 65, why should it be any different in companies?
Behind the term “senior” hide at the same time an experienced worker, a worker at the end of his career, a young retiree and a person close to old age.
The word senior actually comes from English and means “experienced”. Originally, moreover, the term “senior” was used in France as in Anglo-Saxon countries, that is to say to describe the competence of the employee and his level of experience. Thus, beginners were called “juniors” as opposed to employees with a certain experience, called “seniors”.
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