Prevent age discrimination in the hiring process

“Age is an issue of mind over matter,” Mark Twain said. “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

That’s good advice. Unfortunately, we know that many employers do pay attention to age. According to the Urban Institute and ProPublica, more than half of workers over the age of 50 lose their longtime jobs before they want to retire, and nine out of 10 never recover their previous earning power.

Age discrimination in the hiring process is a real problem, and with so many folks unemployed right now in Connecticut (home to the seventh-oldest workforce in America), we must take action this legislative session to protect older workers and ensure that our economic recovery is as strong and fair as possible.

As chairman of the Aging Committee, I’m proposing a bill that would make Connecticut a national leader in this regard. My bill prohibits employers from asking for age-specific information — such as dates of birth, school graduation and attendance dates — on job applications. Unless there’s a bona fide occupational need for determining your age (a bartender being at least 21, for example), the employer doesn’t need to know what year you graduated high school or were born.

If enacted, Connecticut would join one of just a handful of states that explicitly ban this type of information on job applications.

My goal is to prevent older workers from being vetted by their age before they ever get an opportunity for an interview. We know that older workers can be just as productive or more than younger applicants — they just need a chance. Researchers recently conducted a study in which they sent out 40,000 applications for fictitious job seekers and used different ages to see if it made a difference in getting call backs. It did.

No wonder then that, according to the AARP, 60 percent of older workers — those 50 and over — believe they’ve been discriminated against because of their age. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the last recession, the average 54-year-old job seeker was unemployed for a year — much longer than younger job seekers. Statistics show that women and people of color suffer even more.

Sadly, there’s no reason to think that we’ll have a more equitable recovery now. A new report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and reported on by the ABA Journal, discovered that the unemployment rate for Americans 65 and older rose about 2.5 percent more in April 2020 than it did at the peak of the recession. Experts say age discrimination is at least partly to blame.

Making matters worse, the United States Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit recently decided that recruiting practices that disproportionately eliminate older applicants don’t violate federal law. Another federal court decision said that protection from age discrimination only exists for those older workers who have jobs, not for job applicants.

This is the third year in a row that I’ve introduced this bill. Last year, it quickly earned bipartisan support, and the AARP and the state’s largest business organization were also on board. The bill was poised for passage until the pandemic shut down the 2020 legislative session.

This year, we must finish the job.