In My View:

The Realities of Age Discrimination

by James Gover & George McClure

In 1967, the United States introduced the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), making age discrimination in the U.S. workplace illegal. ADEA was intended to protect workers aged 40 and older, but the growing body of age discrimination cases indicate that it has not served its purpose (www.eeoc.gov/laws/adea.html).

Views Haven't Changed

In 1900, life expectancy was 49 years, and only four percent of the U.S. population lived to be 65 or older. By 1995, life expectancy increased to 75 to 80 years, with 12.5 percent of the population living past 65. By 2030, life expectancy may reach 100+ years, and 20 percent will be 65 or older (http://psych.colorado.edu/~ewade/4684/1Introduction.pdf).

By 2010, 15.8 percent of the population will be over age 65, and seven percent will be 75 or older. However, less than three percent of those over 65 are projected to be in the workforce. And fewer than one percent of those over age 75 will be working, because today’s median age for retirement is less than 62 (www.ebri.org/facts/0701fact.htm, www.bls.gov/emp/emplab2000-11.pdf).

Older engineers who are healthy and capable of working more years are quickly exiting the U.S. workplace. The worker shortage that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has long predicted may finally materialize when baby boomers start retiring. Our nation would be better served if this body of intellectual capital didn't spend all of its time playing golf, tennis and bridge.

Industry Cost-Cutting Hits Older Workers Hard

Why are we losing so many capable older engineers? A lot seems to relate to the pressure for industry to reduce costs. Ten percent of Verizon Communications middle management accepted an early retirement offer. Sprint Corporation has used early retirement incentives to reduce staffing by 21,000 over two years. AT&T Wireless is dropping 3,000 workers in the United States to move the work overseas.

Furthermore, companies are reducing pension costs by shifting from defined benefit plans to cash balance plans that provide a lower retirement benefit. This conversion often allows employees who retire by a given date to receive the older, more generous pension and medical benefits. Therefore, employers are placing retirement candidates in a “Catch-22” situation: keep working while earning little or no more pension benefit, or retire early and enjoy higher retirement benefits. Older engineers whose salaries have finally doubled in purchasing power over the salary they earned just after graduation from engineering school are barraged with signals from management that they are not wanted.

Myths Persist

Many older engineers find it almost impossible to land new jobs because of workplace myths. Most of these ideas are false and do not withstand scrutiny.

• Older engineers cost more. In reality, those who earned retirement and health care benefits from previous employment can cost new employers less. In addition, new employers benefit from the depth of experience older engineers bring to the job.

• Older engineers are sick more. Actually, older engineers take fewer sick days than engineers under 40.

• Older engineers can’t learn new technology skills. While the training may take longer than with younger engineers, older engineers change jobs less frequently, making net training costs lower.

• Older engineers are less productive. In reality, older engineers work smarter, have fewer false starts, have better interpersonal skills, can make decisions without great concern for career implications, know when to intervene in a situation, and are often mentors for younger workers.

• Engineers exhaust their creative talents and are out of date by age 45. Although technology is changing quickly, the physical and mathematical basis of engineering — qualities emphasized in engineering education — have changed little over the past three decades. Creative and non-creative people are as creative or non-creative at age 65 as they were at age 30. In fact, recent research shows that family life responsibilities — generally at their highest when people are in their mid-30s to mid-40s — dilute innovative skills far more than aging. Older engineers whose children have graduated from college can actually devote more time to their jobs and can be more innovative than younger engineers.

A 2002 IEEE-USA survey of unemployed IEEE members found that the time it takes to obtain a new position — a median 38 weeks — increased with age by about 1.3 weeks per year. And when multivariate regression estimates were included in the analysis, the impact of age was even more dramatic — with each additional year of age equating to three additional weeks of joblessness. Those reporting age as a barrier to re-entering the workforce face longer periods of unemployment (55 weeks) than those who do not (30 weeks). Laura Langbein, an American University public affairs professor, analyzed and reported the results, which are available at www.ieeeusa.org/careers/survey/2002results.pdf.

Age Discrimination Fastest Growing EEOC Case Category

Although gender, racial, religious, nation of origin and sexual preference discrimination make newspaper headlines and are emphasized in training courses on diversity, age discrimination is the fastest-growing category of discrimination cases filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Subtle examples of such discrimination include:

• Salary curves typically show corporate engineers’ salaries declining after age 45. Companies often go to great lengths to disguise this obvious discriminatory practice.

• Some engineering colleges, whose salaries are below the national mean, are most out of line for full professors, the group populated by the most experienced — and therefore oldest — faculty.

• Hiring preference is given to candidates who received their last degree within two years. Even today, one U.S. Department of State-funded laboratory has this policy. Yet, some engineering educators argue that the quality of engineering graduates has diminished over the past two decades, as the benefits accruing to those holding engineering degrees have declined.

• While lip service is given to the dual-ladder concept, in which promotions are possible for engineering contributions, some companies discount the engineer who has not moved into management, and consider termination for an older engineer who has stayed at the same management level for several years.

• In some instances, the most undesirable teaching assignments in universities, and dead-end positions in industry, are assigned to older engineers. Some universities hope the older faculty will retire, while companies may lay off engineers on projects that end rather than reassign them. The fact that those laid-off are older than the average worker is seen as coincidental. This obviously discriminatory position was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in an age discrimination case brought by laid-off engineering employees against Florida Power Corporation. EEOC did find age discrimination in a landmark case in 1996 (http://www.eeoc.gov/press/11-21-96.html).

• Many companies will not promote older engineers into management, rationalizing that they will not have sufficient years left in their careers for the company to make the investment worthwhile.

Can We Keep Older Workers Working?

What can be done to retain and attract older engineers to cope with the engineering shortage that NSF has claimed for 20 years to be imminent? Dispelling the negative stereotypes that persist about age is a start. In the spring of 2000, IEEE-USA commissioned a survey of attitudes toward older workers. A summary of the survey results are available at www.todaysengineer.org/careerfocus/feb01te/.

In addition, focusing more resources on retraining engineers in emerging technology areas and periodically refreshing their engineering math and science backgrounds are essential. Also, the trend to offer flexible working hours and telecommuting provide added incentives to keep engineers working. Finally, some full-time jobs can be divided into two half-time jobs, as a way to attract those who are interested in working part-time to supplement pensions or retirement savings. This option has the added advantage that one worker can cover for the other during sick days or vacation days (www.todaysengineer.org/careerfocus/july01te/).

Some argue that more should be done to control and correct instances of age discrimination. For example:

• Members of engineering societies such as the IEEE can browse the Internet for public records on employers that have discriminated against society members. A Google search on “age discrimination lawsuit” brings up more than 1,500 citations. Older engineers who are seeking new positions should be informed about companies, universities and federal laboratories that discriminate against senior engineers.

• The $11 trillion U.S. economy need not be accessible to institutions — including those headquartered outside the United States — that mistreat seniors.

• Members can communicate with their elected representatives when government-owned laboratories discriminate against older engineers, to encourage withholding federal funds unless those laboratories reform their practices. Federal agencies that propose policies that discriminate against seniors may face calls to have their budgets zeroed out.

• Members of Congress and executive administrations that do not champion senior causes can be voted out of office. (A recent example of the power seniors have was the passage of the Medicare prescription drug bill.)

Employers and legislators should take note that the baby boomer generation now wields unprecedented political power, and is not likely to accept unjust employment practices without a fight. As EEOC chairwoman Cari M. Dominguez said in a March 2003 interview with the AARP Bulletin, "Baby boomers believe they helped develop the core values of our society, which prohibit discrimination," making them "very comfortable" in asserting their rights.

For More Information

A more detailed discussion of age discrimination, from which this summary is adapted, is “America’s Real Workforce Problem: The Age Discrimination Epidemic,” by J.E. Gover, P. G. Huray, and N. Matloff.

More on high-tech workers and age discrimination is found at www.ieeeusa.org/EMPLOYMENT/age.html.

References

• Workforce 2020: Work and workers in the 21st Century. Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 1997. By 2020, 16.5 percent of the population will be 65 or older. The percentage of male college graduates in the workforce had declined from 96.1 percent in 1970 to 93.8 percent in 1995; with recent high job termination rates, this had dropped to 84 percent in 2002 (ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/lf/aat7.txt).

• Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2001, Table 614: “Workers Using Computers on the Job: 1993 and 1997.”

• Nicholson, Trish, "Your Life: Boomers Discover Age Bias," AARP Bulletin, March 2003.
  (www.aarp.org/bulletin/yourlife/Articles/a2003-06-26-boomers.html)

 

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James Gover is a member-at-large of the IEEE-USA R&D Policy Committee.

George McClure is chair of the IEEE-USA Career & Workforce Policy Committee and technology policy editor for IEEE-USA Today’s Engineer.