Paris (AFP)

"Difficult to manage", "resistant to change", "low ability to adapt to new technologies" ... Often victims of clichés, seniors struggle to keep and especially to find a job while the executive will ask all to work longer.

In its annual report to be published Thursday, the association Solidarités nouvelles face unemployment (CNS) sift the situation of over 50 years in the labor market, these "forgotten jobs policy".

This is the case of Marc, 57, who has been looking for a job for ten months. This Parisian executive, who worked in the field of compliance auditing, finds it "very difficult".

He immediately evokes the level of salary: "seniors have the reputation of being expensive but when we lower our pretensions, it is not suitable either!", He explains after having experienced it.

Beside the question of the salary which slows the recruitment of a fifties, that of the management.

"I had an interview in a company where I had the whole profile, I found myself in front of a young woman of 27 or 28 who would have been my boss She looked at me with amazed eyes even before I opened my mouth! ", explains AFP this training engineer. He was not selected.

He who feels "fit" and "wants to work" theoretically still has seven years of active life before a full-rate retirement at age 64. Not without humor, he slips that he is "15 years younger than Jean-Paul Delevoye", high commissioner for pensions, 72, chosen to lead "essential reform".

- Age threshold irrelevant -

Unemployed for a year, Carine, 49, finds that "from the age of 40, for women, it's hard". "The psychologist from Pôle emploi told me that I should not put my age on his resume because I will not be taken," says this home help who lives near Meaux.

In reality, the term "senior" does not mean much.

"We are on a field that would go from 50 years to 67 years or 70 years," said Annie Jolivet, researcher at the Center for Employment and Labor Studies (CEET) CNAM, specialist of the subject.

"We should stop referring to an age threshold," she says.

"You have to think about the organization of work" and "health at work", she advocates. "Retention in employment of older people also requires prevention" regardless of age, she explains, dubious on the same measures for seniors stricto sensu.

The over 50s remain "on average 673 days enrolled" at Pôle emploi against "404 for 25/49 years", says SNC in his report.

"Since the end of the exemption of job search (end in 2012 of a device that exempted a job seeker to look for a job from 57 years, ed), the number of unemployed over 60 years increases , and this trend will continue, "predicts Annie Jolivet.

In parallel with the pension reform, the government has repeatedly assured that it will work on the employment of seniors.

Christine, 51, commercial assistant, lives south of Poitiers and tells her job search: "I've already been told: + you're probably not going to have a child, but are you going to be a grandmother? ? + "

Of course, no employer tells him directly about his age, but "they play on the words" or make "discrete allusions". "I was asked if at my age + I was able to use new software," she says, astonished, or "she could adapt to a new work environment."

"It's not easy to answer that without sending them back to the figure ... they're the same age," or more, she's indignant.

© 2019 AFP