A lawyer for over 25 years, I also teach part-time at a local public university. My courses include “American Law and Literature,” an advanced elective that I developed. Beginning with the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, my students read essays, speeches and literary works that reflect upon the laws and urge legal reform. This week, we read Martin Luther King’s iconic essay, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which Dr. King responds to the criticism of Southern ministers who had urged that he and his followers forgo the boycotts and civil disobedience that they had employed to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. I emphasized to my students that Dr. King’s essay illustrated an important theme in our course, that our nation had steadily moved toward increasing inclusiveness. The sole participants in the conference rooms of Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 had been wealthy white men. In the first decades of the 19th-century, the circle of privilege had expanded to include farmers, artisans and other members of what we now term the working and middle classes, who gained the right to vote as state property requirements were rescinded. The abolitionist movement and Civil War era amendments marked the first steps in achieving African-American equality, a battle that we continue to fight today. Women gained the right to vote in 1920, with the passage of the 19th Amendment. The past 30 years have witnessed the recognition of LGBTQ rights: again, a battle that is ongoing.
I concluded by suggesting that the next battle will be against ageism, an irrational prejudice that banishes middle-aged and older workers from the workplace. Ageism has terrible consequences. Many older workers have financial responsibilities that they cannot meet without salaries. Most view work as an essential element in their identities. We read in the media about the increase in suicides among people in their 50s and early 60s; many of those who take their lives are facing the prospect of decades without paid labor. That prospect and its consequences are life-changing.
Nor are all unemployed older Americans blue-collar workers whose jobs have been lost to new technologies, or moved overseas. Many of the clients whom I serve in my legal practice (I’m an employment lawyer) are professionals – lawyers, editors, managers, marketing experts – who have found themselves “unemployable” in their 50s or early 60s, chiefly because their former employers seek, for no well-founded reason, to create a younger workforce.
When I made my suggestion in class the other day, I expected my students to nod. For one thing, their parents are among those affected by ageism. There were some nods, to be sure. But to my surprise, there was also laughter. “Ageism – that sounds funny!” exclaimed one of my best students, a young woman in her 20s. The three senior citizen auditors in my class - women in their late 60s and early 70s – gasped. I suppose that I blinked. “Why funny?” I asked. “I don’t know,” my student responded, “it just sounds made up.”
What my student’s response proved to me was that, regardless of how well-read, socially conscious and smart millennials may be – and believe me, they are a “plugged in” generation – ageism remains a form of prejudice that many Americans discount or ignore. Moreover, they do so precisely because, without meaning to be, they are ageist. Although prohibited by the federal Age Discrimination in Employment law, as well as by state and local statues and regulations, ageism is rampant in the workplace. It seems that many employers - and many younger Americans - continue to embrace the false assumption that older people want to and should “retire.”
Yet in today’s world, leaving the workforce in their 50s and 60s would impoverish most workers. We delay marriage and childrearing until we obtain professional credentials, often not starting families until well into our thirties. It takes many years to pay off student loans and save the downpayment on a home; by that time, we are saving for our children’s college educations. With so many financial obligations delaying the creation of the proverbial “nest egg,” and a life expectancy of 80 or longer, rare is the worker who can afford to retire in her 50s or 60s, never to work again.
Yet premature retirement is what today’s workplace often demands. Regardless of the anti-discrimination laws, many employers terminate older workers in the course of so-called “restructurings,” while screening out older job applicants as “a poor fit.” (The latter is particularly easy to do in the age of on-line applications, when hundreds may apply for a single job and few applicants ever learn why they are rejected.) As reported by journalist Jessica Bruder in her recent book, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” many of those who do find employment are forced to accept minimum wage, seasonal part-time jobs, far less than what they had formerly earned. The impact is particularly great on older women who, due to gender discrimination – that “glass ceiling” – rarely develop the client base or put aside the assets that would permit them to survive layoffs or an economic downturn.
Why don’t we hear more about ageism? For one thing, as with sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination, many of those who lose jobs are forced to sign nondisclosure agreement and non-disparagement clauses to obtain severance and benefits, thus preventing them from speaking – to anyone -- about their experiences. One reason that my excellent student thought that the term ageism sounded “funny,” -- failed to recognize the pervasiveness and consequences of age discrimination - was that she had not heard the stories of those who had been victimized. Like the accounts of women who have been sexually harassed in the workplace, such stories need to be told.
I explained to my students that the “magic circle” of rights would continue to expand as our nation matured, adding that ageism would become an even greater cause for concern as the members of the millennial generation lived into their nineties or beyond. My senior auditors affirmed that consciousness raised early, led to justice affirmed. “You may not think it’s important now,” one commented, “but you will later!” One can hope that all of us, but particularly our millennials, will join in an effort to further enlarge that “magic circle” that assures so many Americans their rights – this time by ensuring that their grandparents, parents and someday, they, too -- do not forfeit their right to work as they age.