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Know many "Boomers" are from generations that don't like to make a federal case out of everything, but someone really needs to start calling employers, agencies et al out on what appears to be rampant age discrimination.
If these places pulled half the stunts they get away with on gays, African Americans, Latino-Hispanics, and other minority groups they'd be on the evening news with the federal government leading the charge to hang.
Speaking of employment/temp agencies, the places have historically been ripe with discrimination and apparently that has not changed.
Employers could (and again apparently still do) specify what sort of persons they wanted sent an agencies would comply. Here in NYC years ago an undercover investigation was launched that found many such places used various codes on applications to indicate race, age, gender, sexual preference and so forth. If you were this or that minority there was a good chance you would not be sent to certain places (top law firms, investment banks, ad agencies, etc....) because they didn't hire "those" sort of persons. If they did it was for "invisible" back office positions where you wouldn't be seen by clients or so forth.
It really doesn't surprise me to hear of that happening. My daughter was telling me about a nurse manager she got into a conversation some time ago- she wasn't interviewing for a job, it was just ais general conversation about jobs and hiring. According to DD, the manager told her that when she was in a position of hiring a new employee, they were told to avoid hiring people who 1)were married and 2) had children, or 3) had a history of any kind of chronic illness or serious injury, even if these were resolved. While HR and everyone involved knew it was illegal as he!! to discriminate against applicants in this manner, but they were still instructed to find some other reason not to hire such an applicant.
We all know that such discrimination, be it for race, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status or history of illness ( especially if resolved) is illegal, and someone could take legal action against an employer who did this- IF he could prove that's why he wasn't hired. But that's the hard part, especially when there are so many applicants for nearly every job- they can always come up with another reason a given applicant wasn't hired, and they can be even pickier than ever- passing over a good applicant because of an issue they believe will make that employee less reliable for some reason- ( ie, kids get sick, that old breast cancer or injuries from a traffic accident might rear their ugly heads and force the employee to take too much sick time, etc).
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It really doesn't surprise me to hear of that happening. My daughter was telling me about a nurse manager she got into a conversation some time ago- she wasn't interviewing for a job, it was just ais general conversation about jobs and hiring. According to DD, the manager told her that when she was in a position of hiring a new employee, they were told to avoid hiring people who 1)were married and 2) had children, or 3) had a history of any kind of chronic illness or serious injury, even if these were resolved. While HR and everyone involved knew it was illegal as he!! to discriminate against applicants in this manner, but they were still instructed to find some other reason not to hire such an applicant.
We all know that such discrimination, be it for race, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, parental status or history of illness ( especially if resolved) is illegal, and someone could take legal action against an employer who did this- IF he could prove that's why he wasn't hired. But that's the hard part, especially when there are so many applicants for nearly every job- they can always come up with another reason a given applicant wasn't hired, and they can be even pickier than ever- passing over a good applicant because of an issue they believe will make that employee less reliable for some reason- ( ie, kids get sick, that old breast cancer or injuries from a traffic accident might rear their ugly heads and force the employee to take too much sick time, etc).
This is absolutely true. I was told this also by someone in the HR field. It's particularly tricky when an applicant has to account for a big gap in their work history that was due to illness. The person I talked to said that the best thing to do is to lie: Instead of saying that you were out of work for two years because of cancer, say that you left work to care for a terminally ill family member who has since died.
Made me think of a couple of experiences my daughter has related in her job searches. She interviewed a couple years ago for a receptionist job at a nail salon. At that point she was applying for anything she could get, and was called for an interview. She said the owner told her that there had been over 50 applications for that job, any number of them were from people who'd lost teaching jobs, and someone who had an advanced degree, and she had no plans to contact any of them for an interview. My daughter was also overqualified and didn't get the job either- although she said she wasn't disappointed as the chemicals in the nail salon were doing a number on her asthma.
Another time she applied for a job at a local Quiznos. At the time they interviewed her, they also interviewed a young Hispanic woman who not only spoke no English, she didn't appear to have much of a clue as to how to navigate the sandwich line, or to serve customers. But guess who was hired for that job? My daughter didn't hear anything back from Quiznos, and the next time she stopped in to get a sandwich, there was the same woman standing behind the counter. One of the other workers there told my daughter that they were all sorry she hadn't been hired, but the owner wanted this other woman- who, even after more than a month on the job, still couldn't understand what customers wanted, or figure out how to make the sandwiches they asked for.
It's not just old age.....
My husband got laid off at 38. Even at that age, he was discriminated against. One job he felt really good about -- he didn't get it because they "thought" he wouldn't want to drive over the bridge every day. While on another interview in the same area, he decided to go thank them for the consideration on the job in person, just to check out who they hired.
It was a woman he had talked to in the big mass interview, who lived 20 miles farther away, and crossed two bridges to get there.
My husband got laid off at 38. Even at that age, he was discriminated against. One job he felt really good about -- he didn't get it because they "thought" he wouldn't want to drive over the bridge every day. While on another interview in the same area, he decided to go thank them for the consideration on the job in person, just to check out who they hired.
It was a woman he had talked to in the big mass interview, who lived 20 miles farther away, and crossed two bridges to get there.
But she was much younger than his 38 years.
That was when we started the janitorial company.
The flip side of this is that if he were younger, he'd probably not have sufficient experience to even get an interview.
In fact, a good portion of "the government" has been involved in a dedicated operation to quash unions for decades now. We currently have fewer unions in America than at any time since the 1920s. And, interestingly, the disparity in incomes between top management and the average worker is also almost identical to what it was at that same time in history. Unions were at their strongest in America between World War II to the sixties. That is also the time in our country when the middle class what at its peak strength. We had strong employment numbers, people made decent salaries, and workers had strong benefit packages. In those days many retirees had healthcare as part of their retirement packages. Imagine that!
In every presidential election cycle, the GOP gets more enthusiastic about expanding the number of what they charmingly call "right to work" states, which basically translates as states where workers have the "right to have no rights." In 2012, the GOP pressed in its platform for a National Right-to-Work Act. Please note that the following article explaining this idea is not from a partisan publication. It was in the Congress Blog published by The Hill, a newspaper with the largest circulation of any Capitol Hill publication, which has eleven blogs dedicated to specific political and policy issues. I am not the one calling the National Right to Work Act "a nightmare for American workers." The Hill did.
Thanks for writing what I wanted to say. You did a better job than I could have.
So many people don't even know that the 40-hour/ 5-day work week came from the unions. The whole idea of sick leave came from the unions. We take so much for granted and people don't know who fought the unrestrained employers of the past so we could have all these benefits and a reasonable work life.
I have applied to many low pay part time jobs over the past couple of years. I send in my application and as soon as I write down my date of HS graduation I know they have my approximate age. I never get a response.
Remember when you left off your graduation date accidentally-on-purpose so the employer wouldn't immediately know how young and inexperienced you were?
I've chatted with one coworker who's set to retire in about 5 years. When he gets to that age when he can collect SS, he mentioned how he needs to find jobs that make no more than $30K/yr, otherwise the benefits will be affected by that. Good to know someone's still feeling confident about social security.
I went to a job fair a few years ago. The room was small enough that you can stand in the center or fairly off center and still see everything going on in the room. It was mostly IT, and I was quite the youngest amongst them. Everyone else were in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. There were 3 or 4 booths of "higher learning", so stuff like Strayer Univ., Devry, Trident, and perhaps Phoenix was the last one (you get the idea)? Those booths had not one single visitor for the first 4 hours. For the last 2 hours, they decided to cut their losses and left early (beating traffic was at least something tangible). The people I was in line with had the same overall sentiment... the attendees have bills to pay. They can't afford to pay $$ AND take 10 to 20 months of classes. Plus, the attendees have over decades of experience, and it's hardly unlikely that those schools could really offer a leg up on the competition.
Last edited by ackmondual; 06-02-2014 at 07:13 PM..
Reason: slight clarifications
Why don't y'all either retire and be grateful, or start a business?
If you have skills to sell, sell them for yourself.
Very callous of you, cindersslipper. Do you realize that when a person retires they still have to eat and pay rent/mortgage, and cover a host of other expenses? Maybe you would like to financially help a few 50-somethings who were laid off and can't get another job because of the age discrimination that is the subject of this thread. You think they should retire with no income until they turn 62? and then get a limited amount of social security because they didn't have a chance to work enough years to collect a decent amount.
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