Employment Assistance Payment (EAP)

The chinese have a saying, shang you zhen ce, xia you dui ce ( the people above set the policies, the people below device counter measures).

Regulating that employers pay ex-gratia payments to older employees when they can no longer find suitable positions for them creates greater disincentives to employ older workers. Couple that with the virtually unlimited supply of foreign workers, what would companies do?

Companies are bottomline driven and it would be naive to expect otherwise. Would they:
A) Avoid employing anyone over the age of (say) 40 so that there is very little risk of having to incurr this additional expense
B) Offer only contract employment to avoid incurring this additional expense
C) Employ foreign workers to avoid incurring this additional expense
D) Find ways to legitimately let go of older employees (e.g. poor performance appraisals, transfer to onerous/unsuitable positions, etc) to avoid incurring this additional expense
E) All of the above
F) Embrace the employment of older workers and dutifully pay EAP giving absolutely NO THOUGHT whatsoever as to how they can avoid incurring this additional expense

Which is your answer?