Age discrimination at work - outrageous and outdated

By Joyce Glasser - 25/09/2008

With Rupert Murdoch, George Soros and Warren Buffett all over 76, one has to wonder why 'John Doe' cannot continue doing the accounts at Nestle at the age of 66. 

 

And a letter from today’s Times sums up the news about the Advocate General’s opinion of Age Concern Judicial Review pretty well.  

 

The letter writer does not know that by ‘employers’ the paper means the CBI, the very organisation (representing only about 10% of all UK employers) responsible for the introduction of the National Default Retirement Age. Therefore, it is obvious they would agree. Their ‘dignity in retirement’ argument was completely discredited by Michael Rubenstein’s EOR Opinion, Age and the Dignity Canard, but the CBI seems unaware of that.

What struck me was the way in which the Advocate General proclaimed that age is different from other forms of discrimination, and that there were all sorts of justifications for discriminating against people on grounds of age. On the basis of what he said, it seems that it would make sense simply to remove ‘age’ from the Employment Equality Directive altogether!  When you really explore these justifications in detail, however, which the Advocate General has not done, they disappear.  

The Advocate General’s thinking about age was once the thinking in sex discrimination and race discrimination, too.  The CBI’s ‘dignified exit’ comment implies a scientific age at which almost all people start to decline so dramatically, so that it would be a burden on business and detrimental to the economy to keep them on. 

 

Some 38 years ago it was unthinkable that a woman could ever run a marathon in under 3 hours.  150 years ago Harvard University had a professor who rejected Darwin, and taught that black people were genetically inferior to white people.

 

The difference with age is that the Advocate General’s, the Commission’s and the Government’s views on age will not only look outdated in 38 or 150 years, they are already outdated.  It appears ridiculous now to condemn so many individuals because of a general characteristic some people wish to assign to the majority. 

 

Isn’t drawing such prejudicial inferences precisely what the Employment Equality Directive was suppose to eradicate?  The Advocate General has not answered the fundamental question: If the Directive is supposed to guarantee protection from discrimination on grounds of age for everyone, as a universal right, which is what the Directive sets out to do, can any Government impose a blanket exclusion on 17% of the UK’s population on the basis of a flimsy justification - which has already been disproved by Government Departments themselves - that it is necessary for workforce planning and the administration of pensions?      

Now we need the grey vote, our MPs, our MEPs and our Judges to answer that question with a resounding NO.  
 
Joyce Glasser