March 29, 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

Outside Group Starts Spending to Block Quinn

“She wants you to think that she’s a progressive, but on the issues New Yorkers care most about, she is always on the wrong side,” a male narrator intones. “All that’s clear when the smoke lifts is her political ambition.”

As a succession of blurbs from newspaper articles suggest that she has waffled on key issues, the narrator concludes, “When Christine Quinn doesn’t support our values, how can you support her for mayor?”

So goes a commercial attacking Ms. Quinn that, starting on Monday, is scheduled to appear on cable television stations like MSNBC and Bravo for three weeks. The 30-second commercial, the first of the mayoral race, comes quite early in the primary season, underscoring the competitive nature of the contest to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

The commercial is not the work of one of Ms. Quinn’s opponents for the Democratic nomination, but of a coalition of left-leaning labor unions and Democratic activists who say they are not backing anyone in particular.

The organizers have pledged more than $1 million to the campaign and are spending $250,000 for the initial television advertising, said Scott Levenson, president of the Advance Group, which produced the spot. Another commercial is to be released this week, followed by several mailers and radio ads.

Ms. Quinn, who has been a key ally of Mr. Bloomberg, is generally viewed as the front-runner, thanks to a high-profile position and a high-octane style that has brought her admiration as well as enmity. With all the candidates vowing to spend no more than $6.7 million in the primary to qualify for the public matching funds, outside money promises to play a major role in a hotly contested New York City race for the first time since the United States Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case.

The coalition opposing Ms. Quinn is called NYC Is Not for Sale 2013 and appears to be a successor to a group that actively opposed Mr. Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election bid. It also includes an animal-rights group, NYClass, that has long fought with Ms. Quinn over horse-drawn carriages and other issues. But the coalition also includes Democrats who had previously been major donors to Ms. Quinn.

When informed of the commercial, however, Mike Morey, a campaign spokesman for Ms. Quinn, pinned the effort on one of her opponents, the public advocate, Bill de Blasio, who has ties to some of the coalition members and is viewed as a strong supporter of animal rights.

“This ad is paid for by a special-interest group, with strong connections to Bill de Blasio, working to circumvent the New York City campaign finance system,” Mr. Morey said. “If Bill de Blasio is the progressive he claims to be, then he should oppose this effort to undermine the most progressive campaign finance system in the country.”

A de Blasio campaign spokesman, Dan Levitan, said the campaign had not known of the spot until a reporter asked about it late Sunday, and he commented: “Nothing undermined our democratic system more than when Speaker Quinn overturned term limits and let Mayor Bloomberg spend $100 million buying four more years.”

In interviews, members of the group behind the ad said they were profoundly disappointed that Ms. Quinn had evolved from progressive activist to business-friendly centrist.

And though their preferences differ for now — one is leaning toward John C. Liu, the city comptroller, and others are likely to back either Mr. de Blasio or William C. Thompson Jr., a former comptroller — they all agreed on the need to highlight what they regard as Ms. Quinn’s faults.

These include her role in helping Mr. Bloomberg upend term limits; her stances on causes dear to progressives, like the so-called living wage and paid sick leave legislation; and her volatile temperament.

“All of us felt a kind of betrayal, so we all decided it would be A.B.Q. — anybody but Quinn,” said Arthur Cheliotes, president of Communications Workers of America Local 1180, which represents city workers.

Wendy K. Neu, whose family owns a recycling, shipping and real estate firm, and has donated more than $45,000 to Ms. Quinn since 2007, said: “She’s someone who doesn’t act on principle. She does whatever is politically expedient.”

Ms. Quinn has been on the defensive in recent weeks. She has been the target of attacks at mayoral forums, and her methods in distributing money to Council members — which some say has been vindictive at times — has come under renewed scrutiny in the wake of last week’s corruption arrests.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/nyregion/outside-group-starts-spending-to-block-quinn.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

The Agenda: A Business Owner Expects the Worst From Health Insurance Overhaul

The Agenda

How small-business issues are shaping politics and policy.

Kurt Summers: It's about fear.Courtesy of Austin Generator Services Kurt Summers: It’s about fear.

The Supreme Court decision upholding most of the Affordable Care Act came as a blow to Kurt Summers, a small-business owner in Austin, Tex. Soon after the decision was announced, he warned his fellow citizens, through the auspices of The Washington Post, that unless “we elect officials to both Congress and the White House who understand the importance of small business and who will return some sanity to Washington” — and repeal the health law — he will most likely have to postpone his considerable ambitions for his company.

In the short-term, today’s ruling will force me to pause and rethink my immediate hiring, acquisition and expansion plans. In order to plan ahead, I need to know what future costs and regulations I will be facing. With the law intact, I expect the cost of doing business to increase and new regulations to be delivered by a federal government that doesn’t appreciate the daily challenges of running a business.

Like many small companies, our business is largely dependent on the prosperity of larger business; if the economy begins to fail, and if our business customers suffer as a result of this law, the ripple effect will force us to hunker down and perhaps even to let people go.

In our first two profiles of business owners struggling with health care decisions, those owners did not have such strong feelings about the Affordable Care Act — they had hoped they would benefit from it, but they didn’t know much about it. Mr. Summers, our third profile, is obviously in a different situation, and we wanted to understand why.

Mr. Summers is a board member for the National Federation of Independent Business, which brought the lawsuit that the Supreme Court decided. He said he originally wrote his article at the behest of the group, which placed it at The Washington Post. Because the N.F.I.B. wanted to distribute its views the moment the Supreme Court spoke, Mr. Summers also prepared reactions to be published in the event of a split verdict or a decision to strike down the whole law.

As it happens, Mr. Summers owns two businesses. Austin Generator Service, a business that his father started in 1978, sells and maintains back-up generators to institutions like hospitals, government offices and high-rise residential buildings. Several years ago, Mr. Summers opened a side business that rents equipment for testing generators and other power equipment. It is called Loadbanks of America, and it has since become his engine of growth. Together the two companies employ 24 people, he said, up from 14 or 15 in 2008. So far this year, he has hired six new people, with plans to hire at least five more next year.

Mr. Summers offers his employees two insurance plans. Most of them subscribe to a major medical policy with a $3,000 deductible. “When you make the deductible, it’s a hundred percent paid up to — I guess there’s no limit on it now under the new health care law,” he said, alluding to a provision, frequently mentioned by Democrats, that eliminates lifetime caps on benefits. (Annual limits on benefits are banned beginning 2014.) There are, however, co-payments for prescription drugs and doctor visits. The insurance is through United Healthcare, and Mr. Summers said he was satisfied with the choice of doctors. This year, Mr. Summers added a similar plan, but with a $4,000 deductible and a health savings account. He does not offer family coverage.

Whatever its limitations, the insurance Mr. Summers provides has gotten more expensive every year. The company currently pays about 90 percent of the premium cost, and “we’ve increased that contribution every year to cover most of the cost increases that we’ve seen over the last three years,” he said. This year the company is paying about $3,360 per employee. Still, that would make this a relatively inexpensive plan, to judge by the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey of employer-sponsored health care, which reports that the average high-deductible plan in the South cost $4,862 in 2012.

But at one point Mr. Summers and his father actually dropped health insurance, because “the premiums exceeded our profits.” Five or six years ago, about the time he got into the load bank business, Mr. Summers concluded that he needed to cover himself and his employees, not only to protect the company should he need medical care but also to lure the talent needed to expand.

And he has big plans for the load bank business. His two companies have already outgrown a 5,000-square-foot storage building bought in 2010; in three years, he’d like to build a 20,000-square-foot facility. He would also like to establish branch offices and supply depots in four to six major cities around the country and hire people to staff them. “Assuming the economy doesn’t tank, and we don’t put the brakes on, we do anticipate being in the 50- to 100-employee range in the next three to five years,” he said. The total investment over five years, in land, people, and inventory could range from $5 million to $10 million.

In his commentary, Mr. Summers wrote that he expected “the cost of doing business to increase,” but in conversation he was reluctant to be pinned down on the new costs he’d face. He said his insurance agent had told him that the consumer protections in the law — such as removing those caps on reimbursed medical expenses — were at least partly responsible for his higher insurance premiums. (“You cannot provide free services and not pay for it,” he said.) But he also acknowledged that it was difficult to gauge the law’s direct effects on his business two years before its main provisions would take effect.

Mr. Summers was more comfortable discussing the health care law’s implications for the broader economy than the direct effect on his own business. We talked at length about why he fears his customers could retrench in the wake of the law’s execution — and how his suppliers might pass on their increased costs to him, raising his costs as his revenue is squeezed. But it turns out that in a long conversation, Mr. Summers’s thinking about the law and its effects is a bit more nuanced. He deployed many ifs and coulds. When pressed to explain why he presumed business — that of his customers and his suppliers — would react so negatively to the health care law, he tempered his pessimism.

“I hope I’m not saying that I’m presuming that is going to happen,” he said. “I think it could happen, and by nature of that possibility, I simply have to be cautious.” Mr. Summers also said that he would be closely monitoring the economy and customer demand irrespective of the health care law’s fate, and he would adjust his plans as circumstances warranted.

The Agenda suggested that his customers and suppliers were unlikely to be any better than he at predicting how the law might affect their companies. He conceded this, and a few minutes later offered an explanation for what seems to be a pervasive sense of gloom in the small-business economy.

“When you talk about an economy that’s sluggish,” he said, “you’re really talking about people keeping their money, people not spending their dollars. And it’s been proven over and over again that the reason people don’t spend their dollars is an emotional decision — it’s fear.

“We could look at this very practically and with statistics and facts, but even if we could prove that the impact of the law was minimal, the emotion of the impact is still there. And what’s fueling that emotion? Well, maybe it’s misinformation, but maybe it’s also just plain and simple uncertainty. Maybe it’s the reality that I’m sitting at my desk with payroll and expenses wondering, ‘What are my customers thinking?’”

The elements of the law intended to help small businesses did not impress Mr. Summers. The wages he pays are too high to qualify for the small-business health tax credit. His firm did receive a small rebate on its insurance premiums made possible by the law, but Mr. Summers dismissed the check as “something stupid” — less than $200.

“It just created another administrative task for my people,” he said. “It was ridiculous.”

As always, we’d like to hear from you. If you have an interesting story to tell about how you provide health care for your employees, please drop us a line.

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/a-business-owner-expects-the-worst-from-health-insurance-overhaul/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Second Quarter


A Mutual Fund Ruling Remains a Head-Scratcher

In the last year, mutual funds have done little to adapt to a Supreme Court decision that defines a fund’s board, not its management company, as the ultimate authority for its operations.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/business/mutfund/index.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Supreme Court to Hear Two Human Rights Cases

The Supreme Court has offered only limited and tentative guidance on the general question of what sorts of human rights lawsuits may be brought in federal courts in the United States. The lower courts in both cases drew a clean line, saying that only individuals and not artificial entities like corporations are subject to being sued.

One of the cases was brought by 12 Nigerians, who said that oil companies affiliated with Royal Dutch Shell had aided and abetted the Nigerian government in torture and executions in the Ogoni region of the country in the early 1990s. The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

The meaning of that language is not obvious, and the law itself was largely ignored until the 1980s, when federal courts started to apply it in international human rights cases. A 2004 Supreme Court decision, Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain, left the door open to some claims under the law, as long as they involved violations of international norms with “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations.”

A footnote in that decision instructed lower courts to consider a related question, too: “whether international law extends the scope of liability for a violation of a given norm to the perpetrator being sued, if the defendant is a private actor such as a corporation or individual.”

With that prompting, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that corporations were not subject to the law.

Judge José A. Cabranes, writing for the majority, said that international law jurisprudence since the Nuremberg trials after World War II allows human rights violations of international law to be “charged against states and against individual men and women but not against juridical persons such as corporations.”

In a concurrence, Judge Pierre N. Leval said that the case should have been dismissed on the narrower ground that the plaintiffs had not plausibly asserted that the oil companies had assisted the Nigerian government for the purpose of perpetrating human rights abuses, as opposed to obtaining protection for their operations.

But Judge Leval said the majority’s broad ruling did grave damage to the cause of international human rights, and had confused criminal and civil law. He wrote that international law took no position on whether civil liability may be imposed on corporations for violations of international law, leaving the question to individual nations. The Alien Tort Statute, he said, allows such liability.

The plaintiffs, in their brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, No. 10-1491, said the Second Circuit majority had accomplished a “radical overhaul” of the law in this area and created “blanket immunity for corporations engaged or complicit in universally condemned human rights violations.”

The second case accepted for review on Monday, Mohamad v. Rajoub, 11-88, concerns a similar issue. It was brought by the sons and widow of Azzam Rahim, an American citizen who was tortured and killed during a 1995 visit to the West Bank.

Mr. Rahim’s relatives sued the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization under a 1991 federal law, the Torture Victim Protection Act. The law allows civil lawsuits against “an individual” who engages in torture or killings.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law by its terms “encompasses only natural persons and not corporations or other organizations.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0bf76003f4d240bed1160b66211b218b

Supreme Court to Hear 2 Human Rights Cases

The Supreme Court has offered only limited and tentative guidance on the general question of what sorts of human-rights lawsuits may be brought in federal courts in the United States. The lower courts in both cases drew a clean line, saying that only individuals and not artificial entities like corporations are subject to being sued.

One of the cases was brought by 12 Nigerians, who said that oil companies affiliated with Royal Dutch Shell had aided and abetted the Nigerian government in torture and executions in the Ogoni region of the country in the early 1990s. The plaintiffs sued under the Alien Tort Statute, a 1789 law that allows federal district courts to hear “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

The meaning of that language is not obvious, and the law itself was largely ignored until the 1980s, when federal courts started to apply it in international human rights cases. A 2004 Supreme Court decision, Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain, left the door open to some claims under the law, as long as they involved violations of international norms with “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations.”

A footnote in that decision instructed lower courts to consider a related question, too: “whether international law extends the scope of liability for a violation of a given norm to the perpetrator being sued, if the defendant is a private actor such as a corporation or individual.”

With that prompting, a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that corporations are not subject to the law.

Judge Jose A. Cabranes, writing for the majority, said that international-law jurisprudence since the Nuremberg trials after World War II allows human-rights violations of international law to be “charged against states and against individual men and women but not against juridical persons such as corporations.”

In a concurrence, Judge Pierre N. Leval said that the case should have been dismissed on the narrower ground that the plaintiffs had not plausibly asserted that the oil companies had assisted the Nigerian government for the purpose of perpetrating human rights abuses, as opposed to obtaining protection for their operations.

But Judge Leval said the majority’s broad ruling did grave damage to the cause of international human rights, and had confused criminal and civil law. He wrote that international law takes no position on whether civil liability may be imposed on corporations for violations of international law, leaving the question to individual nations. The Alien Tort Statute, he said, allows such liability.

The plaintiffs, in their brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, No. 10-1491, said the Second Circuit majority has accomplished a “radical overhaul” of the law in this area and created “blanket immunity for corporations engaged or complicit in universally condemned human rights violations.”

The second case accepted for review on Monday, Mohamad v. Rajoub, 11-88, concerns a similar issue. It was brought by the sons and widow of Azzam Rahim, an American citizen who was tortured and killed during a 1995 visit to the West Bank.

Mr. Rahim’s relatives sued the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization under a 1991 federal law, the Torture Victim Protection Act. The law allows civil lawsuits against “an individual” who engages in torture or killings.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the law by its terms “encompasses only natural persons and not corporations or other organizations.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=0bf76003f4d240bed1160b66211b218b