When it comes to ageism, the old is new again
USbased technology companies’ cult of youth borrows from a long history of workplace discrimination
In recent months, employees at Google, Intel and IBM have sued for age discrimination, part of a growing chorus of voices alleging a pervasive culture of ageism throughout the tech industry. There’s nothing innovative about such practices. Twenty-first century tech companies may be acting much like the now-antiquated cutting-edge industries that pioneered age discrimination more than a century ago. Then, as now, employers willfully ignored the fact that older workers are generally just as competent as younger ones — sometimes more so.
In the US, the historical record offers scant evidence of workers getting laid off at 40 and up. But that’s largely because most men didn’t live all that long: prior to the 1870s, for example, the average life expectancy of white males hovered somewhere in the 40s. Few corporations bothered to impose mandatory retirement ages.
But as several historians have noted, age discrimination became a widespread phenomenon after the 1870s. In 1870, life expectancy stood at a miserable 39 years for white men. Still, that was only the average, and enough men lived considerably longer. Indeed, 80.6 per cent of men over the age of 65 still had a job at this time. Yet by 1910, that number had dropped to 63.7%, despite the fact that life expectancy for white males rose to 48 in the intervening years. Age discrimination got worse at precisely the moment more men started living longer.
Blue-collar workers were at a particular disadvantage as new technologies supplanted older, slower methods of production. In typesetting, for example, the new Linotype machine required fast fingers and excellent vision. Employers used the change to justify firing older workers.
Legislative limits on the length of the workday also encouraged age discrimination. After a growing number of states compelled some industries to limit workdays to nine hours, companies pushed workers to become more productive to compensate. Many employers quickly cut older workers, arguing that they could not keep up with the new pace of work.
The Great Depression moved the debate over age discrimination to the center of public attention. Companies struggling to cope with the disaster laid off older workers in droves, many of them married men with families to support. In response, economists on the federal and state level began gathering statistics on the scope of the problem.
In 1964, activists eager to end age discrimination took their case to the federal level. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned other forms of discrimination, opened the door to reform. Although that legislation did not address age discrimination, it directed the Secretary of Labour to study the problem. The resulting report found pervasive evidence of age discrimination: Half of the nation’s employers imposed age limits in hiring people. The report found that while discriminating on the basis of age could be justified under certain circumstances — the physical demands of the job, for example, or fears about the costs of pensions and benefits — many companies discriminated because they continued to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that older workers could not do their job as well as their more youthful peers. The findings spurred Congress to pass the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967. Since that time, most employers have been far more careful not to discriminate against older workers, even if the practice continues.
The tech sector, by contrast, has shown no such caution. The words that Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg blurted out not too long ago — “Young people are just smarter” — seems to guide these companies’ hiring practices.
History suggests they might want to change their tune. The industry is already struggling with enough public-relations disasters. Practicing short-sighted age discrimination won’t help their case.