Crazy bill might as well prohibit job interviews
Having proclaimed with great political correctness but no sense at all that boys can be girls, men can be women, and vice versa, state government soon may proclaim that there’s no relevant difference between youth and age either. For legislation under consideration in the General Assembly would prohibit employers from asking job applicants for their birthdates and high school and college graduation dates, lest the information facilitate age discrimination.
The legislation is crazy, even if Connecticut is drowning in crazy legislation. For those dates confer information that is useful to an employer quite apart from any desire to discriminate irrationally on account of age alone.
That’s because youth and age each have their advantages and disadvantages. Youth tends to bring more energy and enthusiasm to a job while age tends to bring more experience and judgment. All these factors bear heavily on an applicant’s ability to do the job.
Besides, any employer interviewing an applicant doesn’t have to ask any birthdate or graduation date questions to get a good idea of the applicant’s age. The employer can just look at the applicant and review his past employment. If, as the pending legislation suggests, any information tending to indicate age should be impermissible, there would be little left by which to evaluate an applicant. Face-to-face and even telephone interviews would have to be banned and all communication between applicant and employer would have to be restricted to writing.
Employers gain little from any prejudice against age by itself, less so as the law increasingly requires medical insurers to accept all applicants at community rates regardless of age and medical history. An older applicant may be disadvantaged by suspicion that he will require a salary higher than a young and less experienced applicant will require, but deciding against an applicant because of his salary requirement isn’t age discrimination, and any applicant can dispel such suspicion.
Especially in Connecticut, where many employers complain about a lack of qualified applicants because of the failure of high school and college graduates to master high school and college work, few employers can afford to hire on any basis other than whether an applicant seems able to do the job at a salary the employer can afford to pay.
Besides, whether because of longer lifespans or higher living expenses, people lately have been working much later in life, which is evidence against age discrimination in employment.
Thus the legislation to remove birthdate and graduation date information from job applications is another solution for which there is no problem, except, perhaps, as H.L. Mencken wrote, the need of elected officials to keep their constituents “alarmed and clamorous to be led to safety.”