Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Age Discrimination and Employment

Here's an article about being too old to hire but too young to retire. I think it's a huge problem in America today, where unemployment is already a long-term problem for many people. Lose your job and you may never get another one -- and simply be discarded by society as being of no use to it. So then there's this large and growing number of people with no means of support, who become a drain on resources instead of producing resources. That's a waste of human capital on practical terms, as well as being inhumane on moral terms. And then of course society wants to blame the victims. That's just evil.
Tags: community, economics, news
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  • 7 comments
...go 2 levels up... Expand
arielstarshadow

arielstarshadow

March 27 2012, 12:55:31 UTC 9 years ago

In the US, our official retirement age - the age at which we can receive our full Social Security benefits (most of us can't afford to take the 30% financial hit to our benefits that would arise if we chose to retire at age 62) - depends on when you were born. For all of us born after 1960, our official retirement age is 67 - and there's been a lot of talk of raising it to 70.

The reality, though, is that the retirement age in the US is 70 - or higher, because most of us can't afford to stop working, even when we reach our official retirement age. It's not just about losing the employment income, it's also about how much Medicare costs (people who think Medicare is free are in for a very rude awakening. My mother pays $200+ a month for her Medicare).

So I definitely know how you feel - to be honest, sitting here at age 43, I'm really quite frightened at what's going to happen to me as I continue to age.
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

March 27 2012, 19:08:15 UTC 9 years ago

The problem with raising the retirement age is that it hits the reason why retirement happens at all: as people get older, their bodies work less well. Older people, as a group, are less able to work than younger people. It just makes sense to let them out of the workforce at some point, rather than try to accommodate all the extra limitations their bodies tend to develop. I believe that people should be allowed to work as long as they want to and can, but should not be required to work when they reach an age that their body starts to wind down. At that point they deserve alternate support.

I also believe that the retirement age for full benefits should be set wherever employers set it, based on statistical analysis of the ages of new hires. That ought to reveal the approximate age at which one becomes unemployable in the eyes of actual employers, not the arbitrary age the government thinks of as "old."