Editorial: Neglecting Elders in the Workplace: Civil Society Organizations, Ageism, and Mandatory Retirement

Introduction

In Lucino Visconti's 1971 film, Death in Venice, a middle-aged composer falls for a beautiful adolescent boy. The movie's opening scene limns a powerful contrast between the ill-fated impresario and a muscular longshoreman in his seventies, who loads the agonized tourist's massive luggage and advises him about a deceptive gondolier. Visconti's magical sequence captures the proudly independent elder worker still possible at the dawn of the industrial age, when a large majority over 65 were employed, and also during the film's own period, before the insidious mixture of retirement ideology and ageism purged most older employees from places of work.

I want to probe the inadequate response of civil society organizations (CSOs)¹ to the astonishing, century-long evaporation of elder workplace voices. Let me start with a striking example. In New Orleans, the levee system's failure after Hurricane Katrina had devastating effects on older citizens, who suffered disproportionately from drowning, malnutrition, dislocation, disease, and property loss. Yet, the website of the Sixth International Conference on Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations (2006)—also affected by the storm (it had to switch its venue from flood-damaged Xavier University to the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel)—omits age in its definition of difference ("ethnicity, gender, race, socio-economic, indigenous, religion, gender [sic], sexual orientation, disability" are highlighted categories) and, at the conference itself, no presentations or discussion groups were devoted to elders. Halfway across the continent, the 2006 Congress of the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences occluded age from its section on "equity" and a featured list of dozens of papers dealing with women's issues neglects the topic, though a sizeable majority of elders are women.

These are not anomalies, but standard instances of the rule that employment equity and diversity concerns within civil society have minimal traction for those beyond age 60 or 65. The United States leads in fighting ageism, mostly because of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and the U.S. Equal Economic Opportunity Commission—which administers the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). But only a quarter of U.S. workers over 65 are employed (indeed the ADEA does not apply to executive suites, where retirement at 65 or earlier is expected). Government agencies supporting older workers (such as human rights commissions) and age advocacy organizations in other developed countries are extremely weak or non-existent. (Most state organs dealing with "seniors" focus on how to assist vulnerable older individuals to compensate for frailties.)

The Law and Mandatory Retirement

There are no laws requiring mandatory retirement; the practice relies on the absence of legal protection for older workers from discrimination by employers and unions. Forced retirement's most ardent practitioners include universities—supposed defenders of equity and social justice. When the United States abolished mandatory retirement in 1986, the post-secondary sector waged a vigorous campaign for exemption. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act finally took hold in 1994, and American colleges launched (still continuing) early retirement programs and bonus schemes to squeeze out aged professors. If carrots do not work, administrators brandish sticks. Accordingly, the University of Maryland at College Park this year removed 75-year-old Daniel Leviton from his popular and unique senior-level course (on dying and grief), and ordered him to teach freshmen offerings instead—a discouragement ploy practiced in other colleges (see "Hell, No—He Won't Go", 2006).

Much anticipated European Union legislation promising to ban compulsory retirement by 2006 turned out to have national exception clauses easily negotiable by a five-ton lorry. Faced with obstreperous opposition from the powerful Confederation of British Industries, which mounted a "work-till-you-drop" publicity campaign, the Blair government last December set aside its plans to enforce workplace rights past age 65.² While older person's advocacy organizations such as Age Concern vainly protested, most British civil society groups remained silent.

In Canada, excepting Manitoba and Quebec (both provinces abolished forced retirement in the early 1980s), workers face an array of mandatory retirement policies. Seconded by the Canadian...