March 28, 2024

Bucks Blog: Older Workers Say Age Bias Is Common

About two-thirds of older workers say they have seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace, and most of them say it’s common, a new survey from AARP finds.

Of those who say they have seen or experienced age discrimination, many (58 percent) say they believe it begins in the 50s.

The survey also found, however, that a majority (75 percent) of employed older workers said their age had not caused their employer to treat them differently from other workers.

That may be because people don’t perceive different treatment in general, said Jean Setzfand, vice president of financial security for AARP. But when they consider specific circumstances in which their age may have been a factor in their careers, their perception changes.

For instance, about 19 percent said they had not gotten a job they applied for because of age; 12 percent said they were passed up for a promotion; and 9 percent said they were laid off or fired, or denied access to training opportunities, because of their age.

The AARP, a nonprofit group that advocates for people over 50, surveyed 1,502 adults age 45 to 74 by telephone in November and December 2012. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Other data supports workers’ perceptions about age discrimination, Ms. Setzfand said. The average duration of unemployment, for instance, is significantly longer for older workers. As of April, it was 50.2 weeks for workers 55 and older against 36.9 weeks for those under 55.

“That’s a hard data point showing something working against older workers,” she said.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, and its subsequent amendments, prohibit employment discrimination based on age for those age 40 and older. But a Supreme Court decision in 2009 made it more difficult to prove age discrimination.

More than a third of older workers said they weren’t confident that they could find another job quickly, without having to move or take a pay cut, the survey found.

So what strategy should you use to overcome possible age bias when job hunting?

For starters, “Don’t start with a preconceived notion that ‘I’m disadvantaged, just because I have more experience,’” she said.

Rather, focus on your skills and polish your presentation to potential employers “so you can present yourself with the best foot forward.”

Also, focus on sectors where opportunities are the ripest, she said. In fields where there is high turnover and a chronic skills gap — health care, for example — employers have a harder time finding candidates with the required skills, so recruiting is more robust. “Think about what you have to offer as a skill set and home in on that,” she said.

The AARP puts out a list each year of the employers that are especially friendly to older workers.

Do you feel that your age has counted against you in the workplace, or in your job search? How did you react? And do you have advice for others?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/older-workers-say-age-bias-is-common/?partner=rss&emc=rss

When a Lawsuit Is Too Big

Justice Antonin Scalia seems to think so, judging by his comments on Tuesday during the Supreme Court argument in the biggest employment discrimination class action in history.

“We must have a pretty bad judicial system,” he said, reflecting on what he had just heard from a lawyer for hundreds of thousands of women suing Wal-Mart over what they say was unfair treatment on pay and promotions. The lawyer had said that a trial judge could rely on statistical formulas rather than testimony and personnel records to decide how much money the company would have to pay each plaintiff if it lost.

“Is this really due process?” Justice Scalia asked.

In other words, does the impersonality of the suit threaten its ability to be fair to each plaintiff and to Wal-Mart, the country’s biggest private employer?

The mass production of justice through class actions can indeed test the limits of the role that courts play in society. But the enormous size of modern institutions, it has been argued, requires efficient, streamlined procedures like class actions to address their failures.

“We are in the domain of mass litigation in mass society, where the private lawsuit is a regulatory enterprise,” said Samuel Issacharoff, a law professor at New York University.

“You need to have mechanisms of enforcement that correspond to the scale of the economic activity.”

Suzette M. Malveaux, a law professor at Catholic University in Washington, agreed that class actions have an important role to play in many cases, particularly those involving fraud and discrimination.

“It’s a balancing act between efficiency and fairness,” she said.

The issue tends to divide lawyers and scholars along ideological lines.

Conservatives and business groups say class actions are a form of regulation through litigation and insert courts into matters better left to administrative bodies. Consumer and civil rights lawyers counter that without class-action treatment, grave but widely dispersed wrongs would never be addressed.

The day after the Wal-Mart argument, a prominent federal appeals court judge issued an opinion in a similar but smaller case, this one brought by about 500 women against Rolls-Royce.

How far class-action procedures “can be stretched is the issue in the gigantic class action against Wal-Mart now before the Supreme Court,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel, ruling against class-action treatment.

“The present case is not as big a stretch,” he said, “but it is big enough.”

Judge Posner said he was concerned about the due process rights of so-called absent class members: women who would be bound by the result in the case even though they had not volunteered for it and had no right to opt out and sue on their own. And he added that something more than a “mechanical computation” was needed to decide who gets how much money should the women win. Rather, he said, the case would require “500 separate hearings.”

Perhaps the most counterintuitive wrinkle in the typical class action is that only a handful of named plaintiffs have agreed to be represented by the lawyers who brought the case. Yet all of the class members will be held to the results those lawyers achieve.

“Ordinarily, you enforce your own rights,” Professor Malveaux said. “Here, someone is representing you without your consent. We only allow that in exceptional circumstances.”

She added that the Wal-Mart case qualified for the exception. “The idea of every woman coming forward and challenging their store manager is really unlikely,” she said.

Richard Epstein, a law professor at New York University, disagreed, noting that the plaintiffs in the Wal-Mart case are suing over “decentralized personnel decisions” in thousands of stores.

“You want to wring your hands,” he said. “This case is so crazy.”

At the argument last week, some of the justices appeared sympathetic to the plaintiffs’ complaint but wary about the courts’ ability to handle so large a case.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=3d615787244effa2e9b7f341e935ea91