Date: Friday, July 22, 2016

Participants (from 9 countries):

Host: Rick
Co-Host: Johny

Teams

Panel PRO (Team A): Zivar, Samir, Boboty, Amin, Ahmed, Rojhano

Panel CON (Team B): Johny, Hanieh, Haitham, Mario

Audience (Team C): Behnam, Elham

Late: Jami

Team A summary:

Young people should have opportunities.
Retired people will have retirement savings and can go onto the next phase of their life.
If we can provide job for the younger generation it will be a benefit for the whole society.
55 it’s a good age to retire.
When people don’t have a job, they will do bad things (crime, drugs, etc.). Therefore we should enforce retirement at the age of 43-44.
Qualification shall be required to get retired. In public sector especially in developing countries there is a lot of corruption and people may work around the retirement age requirement and people stay in the same job for more years and keep on receiving a good salary for many years. The age for retirement shall depend on the kind or job the person has.
Giving the opportunity to younger people can be a solution to solve crime, immigration over-population problems and the rate of jobless people.
First of all, retirement is a right we all earn. Retirement age depends on the country. Most people can work at old age but again it depends on the kind of job. In countries where there is low rate of employment it's because there is a good retirement plan and job employment plan.
In many countries, there is a limited labor market, which means that there are fewer job employment opportunities. In some countries, where there is high unemployment of younger people, particularly educated younger people, this can lead to civil unrest and other social problems. Governments have a responsibility to look at the whole of society and make sure that people within that society have the basic opportunities.
Even for those employed, if they have to stay at lower paying positions, due to the all the senior positions being taken by those that no longer "need" to work, this leads to a lack of upward mobility and promotional opportunities, which can impact the motivation of the workforce.

Team B summary:

It’s not fair for a person who had studied hard for years throughout college and universities and spend years trying to get promoted, dedicating most of his/her time and sometimes sacrificing so much just to reach the position he/she wanted all his/her life just to get kick out because he/she got too old.
Many families depend on the salary that an experienced mature person can get after years of hard work and sacrifices.
Taking the jobs from mature people just to give it to younger ones is not the solution for the low employment rate. If there is a lack of available jobs, the solution is to generate more job opportunities, not taking the job of an old person.
Age is less important than skills. It’s a lifetime investment of time and effort that we would take out from people.
It’s not fair to judge people based on their age rather than their skills, experience or performance.
It’s not reasonable to retire a person if the person is still sane mentally and physically capable to do the job.
Highly experienced people should not be considered as a burden. They should rather keep their jobs and train the young employees.
It can be counterproductive because if mature people are getting retired forcefully, their will take a lot of money from the young employees, and from the company and they will have to work more and more hours to cover the cost of retiring an old employee and consequently, companies will have fewer opportunities to employ new people.
Where to find the money for the pension? Every change we make, it will cause a change elsewhere. Lowing the age of retirement is not the solution. What we need to do is to improve our employment plan for young people and not have them pay for the pension that old people would receive.
Nowadays jobs have changed from an age-based appreciation to a knowledge-base appreciation. Knowledge and experience is more important now for companies and for employees since it’s in their best interest to retain this knowledge capital. Knowledge is an investment.

Team C summary:

When we say “it’s should be mandatory at a certain age”, we give the message that mature people are no longer useful for society and this is an awful message.
All human beings are important and we should not tell old people that they should be at their homes because we need to give their jobs to young people.
It’s more important to do a job well and with experience than having young people who know less about the job and the company’s need.

Votes:

Elham voted for team B.
Behnam voted for team A.

It was a tie. Thanks everyone for participating. Below are the links to listen to this discussion.

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