Will You Still Love Me When I'm 64? Try 50

Forty years ago, when the Beatles were claiming "All You Need Is Love" and the place to go was "Alice's Restaurant," employment discrimination largely meant racial discrimination. When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 (and ammended in 1991),it protected employees from general on-the-job discrimination based on race, religion, sex, and national origin, but for the next two decades, the focus was mainly on racial problems. Today, following passage of the Age Discrimination In Employment Act in 1967, and the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, all the various forms of prohibited employment discrimination are receiving a great deal of attention.

Today, a major focus of employment discrimination is on cases based on age. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects workers forty and over from being fired or denied jobs or promotions because of age. There is no upper age limit to the ADEA. Not long ago, a $1 million dollar lawsuit was filed by an eighty-year-old neurologist and psychiatrist against the New York City Department of Mental Health, who charged that her application for employment in response to a newspaper ad was ignored because of her age.

Age discrimination became a major issue in the late 1980s, when, in a practice known as "downsizing" (euphemistically, "rightsizing"), employers looked for ways to cut expenses—these included the higher salaries and fringe benefits of older workers. And as the workforce grows older, and pressure to become more efficient increases, so will the risk of age discrimination.

Some of the biggest layoffs in recent years have been in the fields of Electronics, Telecommunications, and Financial Services. When major banks announce plans to merge, stockholders are thrilled—a reaction not shared by the thousands of employees whose jobs are eliminated because of the merger. In 1997, financial giant, Citicorp, laid off 9,000 jobs worldwide. At the end of that year, thousands of workers got pink slips instead of Christmas bonuses at such companies as General Motors (42,000), Kodak (10,000), Woolworth Corp. (9,200), International Paper (9,000), Fruit of the Loom (7,700), Montgomery Ward (7,700), and Levi Strauss (6,400). And the trend continues.