Move over Grandma
Is age discrimination proving ruinous to the young?Age discrimination as we know it is gifting walking sticks to colleagues on their 50th birthdays, or firing somebody when they admit they understand how a gramophone works. Basically, it’s a one way street for the young against the old. However, it’s time we broadened those horizons.
Yes, discrimination against the elderly (or is that temporally challenged?) is pervasive and the case is a good one. According to the government, older workers are just as productive, just as successful in training, take less short-term sickness absence and tend to offset any loss of speed with better judgment. Score one for the fogies.
But let’s look at the facts. In terms of numbers, the problem of youth unemployment, those aged 16-24, eclipses that of unemployment among the 50-65 bracket. Nearly one in eight young people are recorded as NEET – Not in Education, Employment or Training.
Despite this, discrimination against older workers seems to be the only kind of age discrimination that gets airtime. There is some talk about youth unemployment, but very rarely about the root causes.
Discrimination against older workers is often headline news, and those that make it to court often receive generous payouts. Sadly, these serve to reinforce the idea that age discrimination is only against the old.
The first recorded case of age discrimination against a young person was only in 2007, and that speaks volumes as to how underdeveloped our perception of it is in comparison.
Part of the problem is how discrimination against the young often takes place passively, i.e. unofficially never recruiting those under the age of 20; rather than actively, where older people already in work might be fired or coerced to resign. You can’t get fired from a job you’re never been given a chance to work at.
Booze in the news
Part of the problem is how young people labour under media-perpetuated associations with violence, alcoholism and drug use — despite all of these being at lower levels now than they were for other generations.
To highlight the extent of it in this country, the UK was the only one out of 193 signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to be openly criticised for its overwhelmingly negative depiction of youth in the press. Apparently countries with child soldiers give a more positive depiction. Yikes.
Professor of Sociology at RMIT University, Judith Bessant, is categorical. “While we conventionally value the signs of youth like youthful faces and toned bodies,’ she says, “we also continue to discriminate quite savagely against young people.”
Her contentions are supported by research from the Department of Work and Pensions, which found that overall perceptions of the old are far more positive than those towards the young. Over 70s are actually seen as friendlier, more moral and more competent than their counterparts in their 20s.
The report also found that those under 25 were twice as likely to have experienced age discrimination than other age groups. Yet almost none of it sees the light of day. Younger people are far less likely to recourse to legal action, possibly because they lack the knowledge, the money or the belief that there is anything they can do.
Two decades good, five decades bad
So we know that young people are getting a raw deal, and that discrimination against the old monopolises coverage of ageism. But what if a level of discrimination against older workers is actually healthy?
Given that many older workers are prolonging their time in the workforce, there is a fear that older workers will not only stop the generation below from moving up into their positions, thus freeing up more junior positions for the young, but they will also be competing with the young for many junior level jobs as they wind down for retirement or take advantage of re-training schemes.
Some activists against age-discrimination claim that these fears are unfounded. They say that by recruiting more older workers, more jobs are in fact created for younger workers. They contend that these fears are tied up with the “lump of labour” fallacy – the idea that the economy has a fixed number of jobs.
Their contention is that by employing older workers, there is more money in the economy, which in turn leads to job creation for younger workers.
Director of the Center for Retirement Research, Alicia Munnell, argues: “There’s no evidence to support that increased employment by older people is going to hurt younger people in any way,” she says.
Logical fallacy
However, pretending that allowing a million more older workers into the workforce to compete with tomorrow would have no effect on youth employment is simply burying one’s head in the sand.
Only some jobs actually create more jobs — there are many where there are more-or-less a fixed number, scalar to population, i.e. waiters and baristas.
It’s arguable that prolonging your stay in the workforce past traditional retirement age is a selfish move from society’s perspective. You could say that those claiming a need to save further for retirement have had a lifetime in which to do so, and are now hampering others from starting that necessary process, especially as by the time today’s young worker retires their state pension provision will be minimal (or non-existent) compared to what it is currently.
A survey from the US shows that more Millennials than Baby Boomers have at least $50,000 in savings, despite the decades that separate them. Those born between 1946 and 1964 have been referred to as the most “fiscally irresponsible” in history. If you were feeling uncharitable you might say: you reap what you sow.
No generation will ever again have the generous pension schemes that older generations have and will benefit from, so it seems particularly egregious to use a lack of savings as an excuse.
A job for a young person and a job for an old person are not equally valuable. Prolonged youth unemployment yields grave societal issues. Long unemployment while young handicaps you from attaining the skills needed to build a career, which can have mental health fallout and long-term social consequences.
The Stanford Institute for Policy Research says: “…the ability to climb onto the first rungs of the career ladder is critical for the young; it significantly impacts their lifetime earnings and upward mobility.”
It’s great for older workers to stay in the workforce when uncontested, but if it comes down to one or the other, jobs are more valuable in the hands of 20 year olds than 70 year olds. Many young workers have young families, are looking to move onto the ever-steeper housing ladder, and also have considerable debts from education which older generations never incurred, all of which are further issues compounded by unemployment.
A wrong to make a right?
We need to seriously consider re-orienting the axis on which we think about age discrimination, as we currently think of it only in relation to older workers.
Part of the problem is that while none of us like the thought of losing our jobs or being stuck without employment when we’re older, none of us will ever be eighteen again. They do say you can judge a person by how they treat those who can’t offer them anything.
Every year for the foreseeable future the workforce will, on average, be older. It is hard to see how a climate of discrimination against older workers can survive in that environment.
The same cannot be said of discrimination against younger workers, whose employment is arguably more vital for the long term running of society. Boom and bust economics has meant that youth employment has been in a permanent state of collapse during recessions, followed by a slow rise during boom years.
The UK hasn’t had a less than 10% youth unemployment rate since the 1960s. The trend shows the problem getting progressively worse. Even years of serious economic prosperity now seem to not be enough, as this report notes: “youth unemployment and NEET rates were already bad going into the recession, having been rising since 2004.”
We may be stuck in a Catch-22 situation. We want a situation where there is no discrimination, but that situation would paradoxically create further youth discrimination, as older workers are more qualified, more likely to have a car, are less likely to suddenly change jobs, have less drive for upward mobility and have better people skills — in general just more of everything.
On a level playing field, the young lose out in almost every conceivably way. Without a minor degree of prejudice against the old, especially in low skilled jobs, we may end up worse off.
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