Age Discrimination Against Older Employees In the Workplace

Age Discrimination Against Older Employees In the Workplace

By: Alexander Shively

          Discrimination is something that has been going on for all of times weather it’s against race or gender but in the workplace there is always discrimination going on. Age discrimination has been going on for as long as people have been aging, there have always been business owners who don’t want to keep older worker on payroll. They feel as if they are making too much money compared to what they could pay someone just entering the industry. The world isn’t built on a even playing field and even though there are laws stopping employers from discriminating against older workers employers are still discriminating against them.

Relevance to organizational performance

          Discrimination against older employees can greatly affect the organizational performance in the workplace. In the article by about age discrimination in the workplace it talks about how steps need to be made to eliminate this problem because aging is a part of life and everyone will eventually become apart of the older work force (Engleman D. 1998). If older employees keep being discriminated against then their moral will become lower affecting the work being done at their job. Work will suffer since they will be spending more time worrying about if their job is secure for the future rather then about conducting accurate work for their job.

Age discrimination can also affect citizenship behavior in the workplace specifically interpersonal citizenship behavior. If an older employee who usually assists, and supports newer employees feels like they are being discriminated against probably won’t do so anymore which can cause performance of the company to decrease. Also if a company has an employee that’s been apart of their business for a majority of their lives and has helped create many new ideas to help further the businesses success the employee may not contribute towards future success, which could influence the business. Overall an organizations future of succeeding of failing can be greatly determined from the types of age discrimination in the workplace.

Description from the article

          In the article about age discrimination it talks about how a man who has been out of work for almost three years and he has sent out over 900 resumes to businesses looking for a job. He says it’s all because of age discrimination “It's a first to be fired and last to be hired”. It talks about how he had been working for an extremely low amount of money compared to what he was making when he was fully employed, but once a job opened for full time it was given to a recent college graduate rather then to him basically because the graduate could be paid less. When (Brenoff, 2012) wrote this article is was to point out that older people looking for work cant even get into an interview because of their age. Talks about how employers are thinking that older workers expect to much pay so they don’t even want to interview them because young workers are willing to work for minimum pay.

This scholarly article is How Age Discrimination is Alive and Well in the Workplace is a study that was conducted where they looked at recent cases of age discrimination that were filed in the past years. They went through over 12,000 but rather more closely at 120 of them. Through these cases they found that after the age of fifty-experienced considerable age discrimination. This study found that age discrimination between genders didn’t make a difference but rather just the fact of how old you were that influenced discrimination. This article suggests that it doesn’t matter what race or gender you are but once you reach around the age of fifty superiors especially if they are of a younger generation they treat the older employee as if they have given all the work they could possibly contribute.

Take away points

          Through the articles we can find that employers need to start to realize the positive of having older employees in the workplace. The article by (shah P, 2005) talks about the benefits of older employees like reliability, mature judgment, lack of impulsivity, timeliness, strong work ethics, and work experience gained over time. This helps show how older workers are actually an important part or the work force. The things to realize is that discrimination against people because of their age can not only affect a businesses financial situation but also can greatly influence a company’s reputation. To keep citizenship behavior up the company needs to stop discriminating against older workers. If citizenship behavior decreases it can also mean a companies performance will fall since young workers wont be getting support from older more experienced employees. Overall age discrimination only causes negative outcomes so we need to find a way to stop companies from being able to fire older age people just because they think their best days are past them.Businesses should realize how important their loyal long time workers are,

References

Shah, P., & Kleiner, B. (2005). New developments concerning age discrimination in the workplace. Equal Opportunities International, 24(5), 15-23. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/199569352?accountid=12924

Santora, J. C., & Seaton, W. J. (2008). Age Discrimination: Alive and Well in the Workplace?. Academy Of Management Perspectives, 22(2), 103-104. doi:10.5465/AMP.2008.32739764

Brenoff, A. (2012, October 8). Age Discrimination: Older Workers Worry About Hiring Bias. Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/08/ageism_n_1881619.html

Engleman, D., & Brian, H. K. (1998). Age discrimination in the workplace. Equal Opportunities International, 17(3-5), 3-7. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/199558526?accountid=12924