Employers make lots of decisions that have major effects on their employees. Among the most impactful are termination and layoff decisions. There are certain things employers should never allow to seep into these life-altering decisions. One is age discrimination.
One would hope companies in all industries would make sure to not subject older workers to unfair conduct, such as unfair firings, due to their age. Unfortunately, some industries see a fair amount of allegations of such discriminatory conduct. Some recent data suggests that the tech industry is one of these industries.
The data is from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. It regards 12 major Silicon Valley tech companies. According to the data, the agency has seen a total of 90 age discrimination complaints against these companies since 2012. The bulk of these complaints involved allegations of wrongful termination based on age.
What do you think is behind the prevalence of age discrimination complaints in the tech industry? What do think companies in this industry should be doing to help ensure that older employees aren’t being subjected to age discrimination in things like termination decisions?
No worker should have to face losing their job for an unfair reason, such as their age. Skilled attorneys can help employees in the tech industry, or any other industry, who believe that a firing they were subjected to may have been discriminatory, such as based on age, understand what legal steps they might be able to take in response to the firing.
Source: USA Today, “90 age-discrimination complaints reflect growing issue for tech,” Jon Swartz, Dec. 2, 2016