Honorable
Congresswoman Bonamici,
With an estimated
70-80 million “baby boomers” entering retirement over the next 15
years, the U.S. economy will be forced to shift the tax paying burden
and dig into the pockets of people who still work, to support the
growing elderly population.
The subject that I
am raising here is the common practice of age discrimination in
employment. There is mounting evidence that employers are laying off
employees who are older, under a variety of covers, while
circumventing the Civil Rights laws of this country. Note that the
definition of older in this case, is workers, who are 40 year old
and older. This definition comes from our legal system, as
represented by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA)
of 1967.
This issue of
marking employees for potential layoff, once they reach the age of
40, is very serious. As a principal member of PDX-TIE.ORG,
an organization that was originally created for the purpose of
mutually supporting employees who were laid off from Intel Corp.
since 2015. I know from my own personal experience, as well as from
the testimonies of many of our members, that Intel Corp.
discriminated against hundreds or perhaps thousands of older
employees by either laying them off, or forcing them to retire. In
fact I filed an official complaint with both the Oregon Bureau of
Labor and Industry (BOLI) and the Federal agency in charge of
enforcing fair employment practices, the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission (EEOC). My charges are currently being investigated.
A recent article
published in Pro Publica, a highly esteemed
investigative journalism web site exposed many of the practices that
IBM Corp. used to get rid of its older employees and either replace
them with less costly younger workers, or shift their jobs overseas.
The relevant Pro Publica article is entitled CUTTING ‘OLD HEADS’
AT IBM and the article content can be found at:
https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/
Many members of our
mutual support organization, PDX-TIE.ORG, once they read the Pro
Publica article, immediately found corollaries and parallels between
the way in which they were treated by Intel Corp. and the various
nefarious methods that Intel Corp. dealt with older employees.
Since I have
dedicated the last 2-1/2 years of my life to researching the growing
phenomenon of age discrimination in employment, I found that affected
employees, have very little support to plead their case and seek
justice, because the current system is rigged up in favor of
employers. Among other things, employment attorneys refuse to take
representation of age discrimination cases under a contingency fee
arrangement. Consequently, there are very few such cases, brought
into court. After all, older employees who lost their main source of
income, following their employment termination, are in a very bad
position to spend large amounts of money on attorney’s fees. My own
personal experience and the testimony of many of my colleagues,
support this fact.
There are many more
issues regarding age discrimination in employment that I would be
happy to share with you and your staff.
Note that while
discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex and
national origin is covered Under Title VII Protected Classes of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Pub. L. 88-352) Vol 42(2000e), age
discrimination in the work place is specifically covered under the
separate scope of the ADEA.
Federal
(and many state laws) provide protection (at least on the books) to
certain recognized Protected Classes, defined by the law as:
Race, Color, Religion or creed, National origin or ancestry,
Gender (sex), and Age.Yet, we find very few cases of age discrimination brought into justice due to weaknesses in application of the law, as compared with other types of discrimination in employment.
Lately,
issue of equal pay and sexual harassment came to light in the news and
began to wake up the public to the fact that these practices are in
fact much wider spread than the public were led to believe. I contend
that age discrimination in employment is much wider than many people
recognize. I noticed that non of your news letters, sent to your
constituency ever mentioned age discrimination in employment as an
action item to be corrected via both public education and legislative action. I hope that your office will attend to this issue at the high priority that it deserves.
Let
us not forget that aging is unavoidable, whether a person is black or
white, male or female, gay or straight. Regardless of gender based
pay equality issues, once a person find themselves out of a job, pay
equality becomes moot.
Thank
you for listening.
--Ron
Tsur
