Peter Gosselin
JAN 03, 2019
[…]
“Nobody plans to lose their
job. If there’s work to do and you’re doing it, you figure you’ll get to keep
doing it,” he said recently. But once employers start pushing people out, no
amount of hard work will save you, he added, and “nothing you do at your job
really prepares you for being out” of work.
For 50 years, it has been
illegal under the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act, or ADEA, for
employers to treat older workers differently than younger ones with only a few
exceptions, such as when a job requires great stamina or quick reflexes.
For decades, judges and
policymakers treated the age law’s provisions as part and parcel of the
nation’s fundamental civil rights guarantee against discrimination on the basis
of race, sex, ethnic origin and other categories.
But in recent years,
employers’ pleas for greater freedom to remake their workforces to meet global
competition have won an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Federal appeals
courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have reacted by widening the reach of the
ADEA’s exceptions and restricting the law’s protections.
Meanwhile, most employers have
stopped offering traditional pensions, which once delivered a double-barreled
incentive for older workers to retire voluntarily: maximum payouts for
date-certain departures and the assurance that benefits would last as long as
the people receiving them. That’s left workers largely responsible for
financing their own retirements and many in need of continued work.
“There’s no safe haven in
today’s labor market,” said Carl Van Horn, a public policy professor and
director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University
in New Jersey. “Even older workers who have held jobs with the same employer
for decades may be laid off without warning” or otherwise cut.
[…]
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