USA: Age Discrimination in the Workplace - Comment by Ronni Bennett

Ronni Bennett TIME GOES BY What it's really like to get older August 7, 2008 In a recent email, a 62-year-old Time Goes By reader (let’s call him Joe), a design engineer, related his efforts of the past year to find work after 18 years with his employer. He had been managing a department of about 15 people. His skills are up to date. He showed during annual reviews how much his group had contributed to the company’s revenue and it had increased every year. Nevertheless, he was told his job was being eliminated, although some months later he found that no such thing had happened. Another had been hired in his place. Joe has a lot of contacts within his industry and he has diligently worked them in addition to casting a wider net through the usual means. In the past year, he has not achieved a single interview. As his financial situation approached desperate, he applied for early Social Security which is about half of what he would receive if he could have waited until full retirement age of 66 or beyond. Joe is healthy and fit, a regular tennis player. A proud man, he refused to take the years of his college degrees from two prestigious universities off his resume and it felt foolish to him when a friend suggested he dye his gray hair. His face, he said, with or without gray hair, would belie his age – if he ever got an interview. Although he cannot prove it, Joe thinks age discrimination is in play. And I don’t doubt it. I had no intention of retiring in 2005, or anytime soon thereafter. But following a layoff, I beat my head against a wall of silence for nearly 12 months before giving up. I used every contact I had and friends of friends of friends too. I spent eight and more hours a day on the phone, scouring the web, making cold calls to places I would like to work. I sweated over individual cover letters and emails, tailoring each one to the job and company, matching my skills to their requirements. As much as it infuriated me, I took all references off my resumes that would give away my age including removing the first 25 years of my professional life. It felt like chopping off a leg. I did everything else that is supposed to fool recruiters and hiring managers into thinking you’re younger than you are knowing full well an absence of years on a resume is the first alert that the person is old and the resume will be ignored. Through every act of denying my age, I kept wondering why the burden fell on me to work around employers’ flouting of the law. What did I get for my efforts? Two interviews in a year, one with a twit of a 20-something interviewer who said, patting my forearm, “Tell me about your life goals, dearie.” At the other interview at 10AM, I was told the job had been filled overnight since we had spoken on the phone at 4PM the previous day arranging the interview. What is called “failure to hire” is the hardest kind of age discrimination to prove – not worth the effort to try. And even in the case of discriminatory layoffs, the legal deck is stacked in favor of the employer. With the longer view now, three years removed from my odious job search, and Joe’s story, I’ve found myself asking: who does age discrimination serve? Who benefits by denying older people work? * It can’t be the government budget. Millions of us who haven’t been able to find work in our later years are receiving Social Security rather than paying into the program. And we pay fewer other taxes than if we were working. * It can’t be the economy at large. We’re not spending as much as when we were working. * It can’t be employers. They have lost millions of experienced people who could be contributing to the bottom line without as many mistakes as younger people. * It can’t be corporations who have fewer people to mentor young workers, show them the ropes and pass on institutional knowledge. It is often said that older workers cost companies too much money. That is just a lie. American workers across the board have lost ground, making less money in real dollars than ten years ago. Every day, newspapers report stories of more executives taking home tens of millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses which increase by tens of millions every year while their companies lose billions and their workers’ salaries stagnate. And why shouldn’t older workers be paid for the experience they bring to the job? Experience is what CEOs claim warrants their obscene salaries that deprive their own workers of a living wage. It’s been a while since I’ve made anything more than passing references to age discrimination here at TGB mainly because it is painful to recall my own fruitless search for work. But Joe reminded me that age discrimination in the workplace haunts everyone older than 50 and sometimes even younger. It is something we should discuss here. Age discrimination is illegal. It is a moral wrong. And it is bad for the economy of the United States. © 2008 Ronni Bennett.