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A federal appeals court dealt a blow to older workers Wednesday when it ruled that an important piece of the federal law barring age discrimination in employment applies only to current employees, not job applicants. The provision outlaws employment policies and practices with a “disparate impact” — actions that have the effect of discriminating based on age, even if that wasn't the employer’s intent.
The 8-4 ruling from the full U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals based in Chicago states that “Congress, while protecting employees from disparate impact age discrimination, did not extend that same protection to outside job applicants.” The decision reverses a 2-1 ruling last April from a smaller panel of the same court, which ruled that the law applies to “any individual” who is “deprived of employment opportunities” because of age, including job applicants.
I disagree. It is a significant blow to all applicants. If you can discriminate based on age in hiring, then you can do so on the basis of race, gender, religion, disability, etc. large companies that have been held accountable of the basis of their overall hiring stats will not need to do this any longer.
This couldopen the door to ‘only whites need apply’ or ‘young women only’ for positions.
BIG business continuing to bribe lawmakers in their favor. Experience, Value, etc. will cease to exist and business continue to be ran in the ground in favor of nickel and diming young more inexperienced workers. The end result EVERYONE loses since you can't run a very operational basis with no training, experience, education. So more layoffs will continue, businesses close because the expertise and experience has been kicked to the curb.
Some of us can speak firsthand on this. You cannot have functional companies if you kick all your experience out the door once they become "too expensive"
I abhor discrimination, but its hardly a race to the bottom, as corp earnings are at record highs.
So quite frankly, their M.O. should be "more of the same".
I do not need to like it, to know it is working effectively for shareholders.
I don’t see these things as related at all. A bigoted hiring manager could rationalize discriminatory hiring on the basis of increasing corporate profits even more, because equal hiring is depressing profits. We don’t need any evidence of this, simply a bias.
I don’t see these things as related at all. A bigoted hiring manager could rationalize discriminatory hiring on the basis of increasing corporate profits even more, because equal hiring is depressing profits. We don’t need any evidence of this, simply a bias.
I am not in favor of record earnings being an excuse to break the law, and I view this court ruling as an error to be remedied upon appeal to a higher court.
It's a bit confusing to me, but from what I understand, this decision was only in regards to disparate impact cases, and not age discrimination in general.
An applicant could technically still have a case for age discrimination against a company, the ADEA still protects them, but not based on disparate impact. So a company can still legally state on job listings that the position requires no more than 5 years or so of experience. The individual that was the basis for the ruling lost his appeal when he tried to challenge a medical technology company that was looking for an in-house senior counsel with no more than seven years of experience (he was 58 at the time of application). The position eventually went to a 29 year old.
Now, to me, this ruling is hardly a blow. I've seen job ads in the past that had a certain range of experience they were looking for. All this ruling does is say that it's perfectly legal for companies to continue to do so, and to continue to not pursue applicants that exceed these restrictions. Obviously, many companies use this and other subtle methods in order to weed out older applicants and discriminate against them.
And many companies don't even have to do any of that. They can do in depth research online about an applicant's background on many of those people search sites that list an applicant's history and age, and then throw the old people's resumes in the trash. Or if the applicant somehow makes it to the interview, once the interviewer sees the grey hair and wrinkles, a few cursory questions and application goes in the trash can.
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