KUALA LUMPUR - An "older" employee can still contribute to a company and might even perform better than a younger colleague, said a unionist.
Metal Industry Employees' Union executive secretary G. Rajasekaran said an older employee was not necessarily less productive.
"He knows the job and might even do it faster than younger employees," he noted in his paper Minimum Retirement Age: Are We Ready? at a conference here yesterday.
The new minimum retirement age of 60 will come into effect on July 1, involving some 600,000 companies.
"I am happy that it is finally being implemented but we are at least 10 years behind time," said Rajasekaran, who was MTUC secretary-general from 1994 until 2010.
Raising the retirement age, he said, was necessary given Malay-sia's ageing society.