One point the author puts forward is that the legal system is making it hard for older people to get jobs. The courts in Chicago and Atlanta have been mentioned as those who are making it difficult for old people to get jobs. According to the author, the recent decisions by the courts made it hard for an old person to go to court because they have been discriminated against. The court in Atlanta had decided that the argument by old people that they have been discriminated by prospect employers does not hold since at the time they are not employees of a company who can be affected by policy changes within the company. The Supreme court upheld that decision by the Atlanta 11th circuit courts (Cohen, 2019).
Also, most job inquiries from old people are ignored. The author says that research was conducted whereby the fictitious people sent job applications to companies. It was observed that those in which the age was indicated to be more than 60 years received less or no callbacks. This is an indication that the majority of workers over 60 are not preferred by employers. A woman who was 44 years old and was applying for a bartender position was denied the job because the employer was looking for younger people. Another person who was looking for a job reported that he was told to his face that they were not looking for old guys. Caping age limit is another factor which keeps older people jobless. One old person reported that a potential employer had capped the age of experience to less than seven years yet he has been working for almost his entire life and that experience he had surpassed that set by the employers. Another point is the online advertisement of jobs. These online advertisements are packaged such that the employer can restrict the age of people who can apply for the jobs. The advertisements are tailored towards certain age brackets which most of the time leave out the old people.
Discrimination against old people
What the author claims to be discrimination against old people when applying for jobs is not necessarily true. The claim that the legal system is making it hard for old people to get jobs is not entirely true. The legal system has been fighting for elimation of age-discrimanatory practices for a long time. If the complainant fails to prove to the court that they were discriminated against by the employers, then the courts will have no option but to rule against them (Posthuma, Wagstaff, & Campion, 2012). When employing people, employers will want people who are flexible and can learn new things along the way. Therefore, employers prefer people with little experience who are still malleable. Majority of old guys believe that they already have enough experience and it, therefore, becomes hard for them to unlearn some things which may be preventing them from effectively delivering on their mandate.
Most of the arguments by the author are not backed by facts. The author has made several claims to support his point that old people are discriminated by employers when looking for jobs. The author in the article has given one case of a woman in her early 40s who was denied a bartending job and used it to generalize that women are the most hit by the discrimination against old people. There are several factors which guide employers when recruiting for new talents apart from experience. The author seems to focus on experience but forgets that there are some jobs which were started towards the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century which require the understanding of technologies, something which the millennials are well versed with. The author should have shed some light on how young people are fairing in terms of employment. The author throughout the article has a tendency of using one example and then generalizing it to apply to the whole issue of discrimination against the elderly
Banning exclusionary advertising
Exclusionary advertising is whereby the employers publish job advertisements which are targeted as certain age brackets. This advertising method has for a very long time disadvantaged the old guys since there is rarely an advert which is targeting them, say maybe people more than 50 years old. Banning this selective advertising will go a long way in promoting equality among all ages (Woodcock, 2018). Besides, the Age Discrimination and Employment Act (ADEA) passed in 1967 forbids the discrimination of people over 40 years from job listings.
To some extent, banning will not solve the problem of discrimination against old people during employment. This is because if a company does not want old people in their workforce, they will devise ways to prevent them. Even if the adverts are made available to everybody online, the application form for the job will require that you fill in the University of graduation and the year. From the year of graduation you have entered, it will be pretty much easy to determine your age bracket. For example, in America, students finish high school at 18 years and immediately enrol for a four-year undergraduate degree. So that means they graduate at around 23 years. With that information, the recruiter can calculate your present age. The resume is another issue which recruiters can use to gauge a person's age. Most old people have some very impressive resume due to their years in the workforce. A recruiter will definitely know that an impressive resume belongs to an old person while those who have a few years of experience and not that impressive belongs to young people.
Old people have been victims of discriminatory employers for a very long time. To stop this discrimination, policies should be enacted so that employers hire on merit rather than age. This will go a long way in ensuring there is equality in the job market for all ages. Some of those policies include banning exclusionary job advertisements and banning employers from asking prospective employees about their ages.
References
Cohen, P. (2019). New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/business/economy/age-discrimination-jobs-hiring.html#commentsContainer
Posthuma, R. A., Wagstaff, M. F., & Campion, M. A. (2012). 16 Age Stereotypes and Workplace Age Discrimination. The Oxford handbook of work and aging, 298.
Woodcock, Ramsi. 'The Obsolescence Of Advertising In The Information Age'. Yalelawjournal.Org, 2018, https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-obsolescence-of-advertising-in-the-information-age.