Building a Workforce for the Information Economy (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Older IT Workers and Possible Age-Related Discrimination
Older IT Workers and Possible Age-Related Discrimination
Pages 133-151
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From page 133... ...
Part II
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From page 134... ...
As a result, the committee cannot determine whether illegal age discnm~nation exists to a greater or lesser extent among employers of Category I IT workers as compared to employers of professionals In over occupations. In addition, it should be noted that the committee was not constituted as a jury or a court to examine individual cases that may or may not have demonstrated evidence of disparate treatment; as a result it did not consider specific instances of illegal age discrimination.
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Employers observe that their high costs of recruiting and retaining IT workers would make excluding workers because they are associated with a particular demographic category self-defeating and would constitute irrational business behavior. In contrast, Congress and this committee have heard testimony from individuals who believe that age discrimination against older workers is widespread.
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From page 136... ...
However, the ADEA does allow employers to take actions that would otherwise be prohibited when age is a bona fide occupational qualification that is reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business, or where the differentiation is based on reasonable factors other than age. In addition, actions motivated by legitimate business reasons that also have disproportionate adverse effects on older workers do not necessarily constitute illegal age discrimination.
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The classic example of evidence of disparate treatment would be an employer that refuses to hire someone, saying "Although you are fully qualified, you are too old for this job." However, as discussed above, Me Supreme Court has ruled that actions that have negative effects on older workers do not constitute disparate treatment if Hey are motivated by factors that are only indirectly related to age.2 To prevail under an analysis based on disparate impact, the plaintiff must first show Mat Me effects of a facially neutral policy or practice disparately disadvantage members of a protected class. If disparate impact is thus shown, the employer must show that the employer's challenged employment actions were justified on Me grounds of business necessity.
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can be proven by circumstantial evidence, and in a recent case, the Supreme Court held that "in appropriate circumstances, the trier of fact can reasonably infer from the falsity of the explanation that the employer is dissembling to cover up a discriminatory purpose."5 In addition, another well-established approach to establishing disparate treatment, called "pattern and practice," allows proof of intentional discrimination by statistics (combined with anecdotal evidence) showing that discrimination is the employer's ordinary practice.
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Nevertheless, the data may offer some explanation for the perceptions of age discrimination by some IT workers. 4.3.1 Data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
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For these reasons, it is impossible to obtain an objective measure of the prevalence of age discrimination in IT employment from EEOC data. 4.3.2 Labor Market Survey Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Because of difficulties in interpreting data regarding claims of discrimination (such as that from the EEOC)
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SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, March 1999, special tabulation.
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7The committee notes that estimates of the displacement rates are a reasonably good approximation unless employment in the occupation was changing rapidly over the 1990s. In particular, the estimate of the relevant pool of potentially displaced workers The denominator in the displacement rate' is based on the number of workers employed as of the survey date Up to 3 years after displacements.
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Department of Labor, Current Population Survey: Displaced Workers Supplement, 1994, 1996, 1998. Also based on Farber, Henry, "A Note on lob Loss Among IT Workers," unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, Princeton University, May 18, 2000.
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However, there are some data suggesting that older displaced Category 1 IT workers find new jobs relatively quickly by being willing to take new jobs that do not pay as well as their previous jobs.8 In particular, younger male displaced Category 1 IT workers experience a 6.6 percent wage gain on their new job; in contrast, older male displaced Category 1 IT workers experience a 13.7 percent wage loss on their new job a difference between older and younger workers of 20 percentage points (Figure 4.5) Note that the greater wage rate loss among older Category 1 IT workers than among younger workers is not entirely explained by the fact that older workers typically lose more after a job displacement because they were more highly paid to begin with due to seniority.
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SOURCE: U.S. Department of Labor, Current Population Survey: Displaced Workers Supplement, 1994, 1996, 1998.
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. These differences are consistent with the tight labor market in IT, which should result in wage gains or smaller wage losses for Category 1 IT workers since IT employers have to pay more to hire displaced IT workers.
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12This result is consistent with the work of Edelman et al., who found that the size of a company correlates positively with the rate at which the company creates EEO grievance procedures, the likelihood of establishing an EEO recruitment program, and the rate at which EEO offices and antidiscrimination rules are created. See Edelman, Lauren B., Christopher Uggen, and Howard S
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As a result, the committee cannot determine whether illegal age discrimination occurs either more or less in IT than in any other industry. Audit studies provide a basis for further investigation on these points but the 1994 audit study by the AARP is dated and may not reflect the hiring practices of employers in today's economy.
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In addition, it should be noted that the committee was not constituted as a jury or a court to examine individual cases that may or may not have demonstrated evidence of disparate treatment; as a result it did not consider specific instances of illegal age discrimination. However, it would be naive to assert that age discrimination never occurs, and many employers recognize that some managers and hiring teams operate from inaccurate assumptions and stereotypes about older people.
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OLDER IT WORKERS AND POSSIBLE AGE-RELATED DISCRIMINATION 151 workers who lose their jobs for whatever reason (company mergers or acquisitions, downsizing, end of life of a product or service, obsolete skills, poor performance, and so on) may inaccurately attribute the cause of this action to age discrimination.
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