Welcome to a meltdown that the Federal Reserve believes may take five more years to restore normalcy. Welcome to the highest real unemployment rates (still rising) since The Great Depression. And welcome to a new era in age discrimination.
In a rapidly changing technological environment, many make a strong argument for younger workers with more updated educational skill-sets. Others simply look at the fact that older workers often are more highly compensated simply because they have risen through the seniority system to the top of the relevant wage or salary scale for their job description. If you want to save money, hack off that older worker (and that can even mean someone in their 40s in the tech arena!) and replace them with a younger, cheaper and more recently trained substitute.
But when meat axe layoffs are sought, rarely do the managers (generally actually only one individual makes the implementing decision) open up personnel files and generate a cost-benefit analysis based on that individual’s record and accomplishments versus their cost. The axe falls. Further, as the workforce skews younger with time, workers are less comfortable with their older counterparts, with whom they lack commonality and connection. With more older workers, having had life savings decimated and home equity values destroyed, clinging to their jobs for lack of retirement alternatives, the situation as become just plain sticky.
According to the July 16th Washington Post, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission – the agency charged with enforcing this nation’s age discrimination laws – “the American workforce faces ‘an equal opportunity plague’ of age discrimination…Workers filed nearly 30 percent more age discrimination charges last year than in 2007. ‘That is a huge increase, and it will continue going up,’ testified Cathy Ventrell-Monsees, president of the nonprofit group Workplace Fairness, at a public hearing at EEOC headquarters in Washington.”
Workers who would blanch at sexism or racism towards a fellow worker don’t skip a beat at the use of an ageist term: “Describing older workers in demeaning terms remains ‘socially acceptable,’ noted Anna Y. Park, regional attorney for the EEOC's Los Angeles district office… ‘People who would not dream of making sexually provocative statements or using a racial epithet will think nothing of calling someone “grandpa” or an “old mutt” or “old bag,”’ Park said.”
Bottom line, there is a vast older segment of the workforce that is both terrified and desperate; they sense that if they lose their job in this economic environment, their productive years will terminate, that if they find future employment, it will only be at a lesser and more demeaning (given their experience) level. They watch this harsh reality settle in with friends and acquaintances that have already experienced the deadly consequences of a horrible job market.
Still, hordes of new college and trade school graduates are being punched out of our crumbling educational system, and they want to find a place in the workforce. Younger workers, already in the work world and often supporting families, face their own employment crises, and the reduced number of hours being asked of workers used to overtime has tanked more than one family’s plans for the future. The difference may be that one way or another, these younger workers have a future. The Post: “‘How often do we hear employers talking about getting fresh blood in?’ asked EEOC Commissioner Constance S. Barker. ‘What are they talking about? They want younger and cuter.’”
I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.
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