It's more than just a matter of discrimination and abiding by the law. It's gradually becoming a life and death scenario. With each passing year, indeed month, the problem is getting personal. More and more 50-somethings (and 40- and 60-somethings) are being laid off as the world economy contracts, but are finding themselves unemployable in a political climate that is increasingly unforgiving and punitive towards anyone who, for whatever reason, cannot find work.

Add to that the zealous war on the welfare state, combined with hyper-superannuated politicians continually driving up the pension age (What am I bid? 70? Do I hear 70?), combined with a bleed-out of boomers' net equity due to a plummeting real estate sector and share market, working till you drop is getting to be the norm.

While some lucky retired boomers , especially the earlier ones, are able live the airbrushed lives of the average superannuation ad, many of the later boomers (late 50s) are facing a very desolate future. Unless our values on unemployment, welfare and age discrimination undergo some fundamental changes, the number of homeless elderly people is set to escalate as the years go on.

The problem with this article is that it doesn't say what's wrong with age discrimination, or preference.

Quoting the Fair Work Act doesn't prove it's unfair, prejudiced or irrational. Besides, the government discriminates against people all the time on the ground of age, sex, race, civil status, sexual relationships, income and anything you care to mention. Who are they to be saying what discrimination is unfair? They are far less representative of society than the mass of consumers and employers whose values they are trying to forcibly override.

Why should employers focus on "skills, competencies and capabilities"? And what makes Malcolm King think he's a better judge of employers' needs than employers?

King and Killarny have got it back-to-front. The purpose of a job is to produce something that other people want. It's not to employ people per se. If it was, we could solve the problem by getting old people to dig holes and fill them in again.

"Malcolm King works in the area of generational workforce change. He works in DEEWR Labour Market Strategy. He was the senior communications strategist at Carnegie Mellon University and the director of the RMIT writing programs. He was also a senior media adviser for the ALP and Democrats."

Notice that everything the author has done has been in the parasite industries?

He has never produced anything that anyone voluntarily pays for and is therefore not qualified to comment on what preferences are or are not legitimate.

If his argument were valid, he has the remedy himself. He should risk his own money and employ all the old people he wants. According to him, they are undervalued in the market, so he'll be doing well at the same time as doing good.

Of course the fact he doesn't do this is because he knows he's wrong, he wants to force others to pay for what he won't pay for voluntarily, and he's parading a fake moral superiority while actively promoting anti-social violence and lying about doing so. A truly pathetic piece of hypocrisy.

Well said, congratulations Peter!

<<How important is dignity or self-respect? Everyone deserves that. It doesn’t matter if you’re 16 or 65.>>

So to force yourself on an employer who doesn't want you there, who holds you in contempt and keeps you grudgingly only because she would otherwise be dragged away in cuffs and see the sky through iron bars; or to call an agency who doesn't want you to call them, who see you as nuisance (and do so every day - now you'll really need a job to pay your phone bill), that's very dignified and respectful - right, Malcolm?

That's an interesting perspective Peter Hume. Thank God I don't work for you.

One of the reasons national productivity is falling is that we don't have enough people working fulltime. One of the core reasons that older people drop out of the workforce is through age prejudice. That costs the Australian economy about $10 billion a year through lost productivity.

It's astounding that Hume does not recognise the importance of skills ad competencies in a global market. He is typical of the type of Cro Magnon thug that believes the whole direction of modern capitalism is to bully and cajole workers to 'build something' when 60 per cent of the Australian economy is based in the service industry.

Hume is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Peter

‘The purpose of a job is to produce something that other people want. It's not to employ people per se.’

No. I’m afraid YOU’VE got it back to front. The purpose of a job IS to employ people ‘per se’, so that everyone is actively contributing to society and earning their own living. This can be done via both profit-based enterprise and service-based public enterprise. The great lie that has gained far too much traction throughout history, especially in recent times, is that only profit-based enterprise can provide jobs and that public sector jobs are little more than an expensive charity.

There are plenty of jobs for everyone – it depends on how they are distributed. A society that fails to do this adequately is a failed society, regardless of whether its economy is in surplus or deficit.

Cheryl, Killarney

Employers are no more guilty of failing to provide jobs for old people than you are. In fact you're more guilty of it than they are because you're actively saying people should do it, even at a loss to themselves, which employers are not. You are disproving your own case. There's "plenty of jobs" that you and everyone who agrees with you, could be providing for old people, at a loss. Why aren't you doing it?

As for the Cro Magnon jibe, it's you guys who advocate threatening to taser and cage people to force them to obey your opinion. I'm in favour of consensual relations, remember? Yours is the law-of-the-jungle school of thought, not mine.

Unfortunately feeling entitled to have a big teat express warm milk into your squalling mouth, or believing that people contribute to society by some people being forced at gunpoint to pay for other people to dig holes and fill them, only shows that your argument is at the moral and intellectual level of an infant.

The concept missing from your mental universe is that other people are not your property, and someone needs to engage in productive activity to pay for your slave philosophy.

You still haven't explained why people's age preferences should be criminalised. How do you know it's prejudice? How do you know it's not justified? How do you know the government isn't wrong? Then what about the government's own age discrimination? Should the government be thrown in prison too? If not, why not? What gives you the right to tell other people what their values should be? Why don't other people have an equal right to tell you what your preferences should be? Why should age preference be criminalised just for "jobs"? Why shouldn't age discrimination be illegal for everything else such as choosing a partner as well? How do you know what wants customers are trying to satisfy by patronising a business, and therefore what are the appropriate characteristics of employees?

You won't answer these because you can't.

Sounds like Peter you've just come out of uni and had you brain zapped by libertarianism and radical skepticism at the same time.

I also think you've been sleeping with Ayn Rand - you wouldn't be the first.

You comments are truly odd in the light of modern management practice, although you'd find some allies in the mining industry and probably what's left of the HR Nichols society.

PS I enjoyed your comment some months ago about urinating on Jocelyn Scutt's front lawn. All class.

Well said again, Peter!

<<You comments are truly odd in the light of modern management practice>>

That's a code-name for stealing - which currently seems to be in fashion (so as being careless about spelling, for who cares when the parasite-government is on your side anyway?).

Indeed your comments are odd in the darkness of these vulgar modern times.

Cheryl, thank you for showing that you have to offer nothing but instant descent into personal abuse when challenged and that you cannot answer my questions which prove you wrong.

I don't know where you got the idea that it is your responsibility to increase national productivity, or that you would know how to. (Hint: you don't.)

All you need to understand "falling national productivity" is that there are millions of people like you and Killarney, who think that productivity is increased by compulsory loss-making activity and punishing employers for employing people: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!.
(Wipes tear of mirth from eye "Ahhhhhh. Idiots".)

I don't recall defending urinating on Jocelynne Scutt's lawn - got any proof? Are you sure it wasn't her defending people's "right" to urinate on other's property without the owner's consent to be there. That's it, isn't it?

Come on Cheryl, Killarney, Malcolm? How many jobs for old people have you provided by mortgaging your house and operating at a loss like you expect others to do?

What are the answer to my questions in my last post? No evasion, no ad homs, no skulking. Just the answers with an admission that you are wrong and hypocritical if you can't answer them.

BTW Malcolm I've just had a look at the DEEWR site. It appears to be include lots of programs that discriminate on the ground of age and race. Comments? Should you be imprisoned like you want other people to be for age discrimination? IF it's socially beneficial when DEEWR does it, what makes you think it can't be socially beneficial when others do it, hypocrite?

Has it ever occurred to you that the government programs you are in favour of, are the main factor you're trying to fix by more government programs?

Actually let's just do a test for critical thinking. List here the government activities that you think contribute to older people having difficulty getting a job? Let's see if you identify a tenth of the governmental factors causing the problem.

Malcolm if you've got a cafe, and your custom is greater when you employ young good-looking waitresses than older men or women, what's wrong with that? Why aren't age, sex and good looks a legitimate part of your decision to employ or not employ?

Should discriminating on the ground of age and sex be illegal when people are looking for a life partner too? If not, why not? Why doesn't the same consideration apply?

Would I be right in thinking you've never employed anyone?

Who are you to tell other people what they should prefer, especially when you don't practise what you preach?

When my mother was in her 60s she told me about this terrible thing called age prejudice. I believed all this and ended up employing two older people in my business.

However I found with both of them they really didn't want to be working. (I've had lots of conversations with older people since in which they joked openly with me about they're over working, maybe that was a coincidence.)

Also, they both seemed to think that they knew better than me (maybe they did but then why weren't they running their own business?). They resisted being told what to do in a way that younger employees didn't. They were slower at picking things up than younger employees.

Now two is not much of a representative sample, I admit. But I only had a small business: about 16 employees in total. On the other hand,it's a bit of a coincidence that both of them - 100% of old employees, being 12% of the total employees - just happened to have these characteristics, isn't it?

I couldn't afford to have employees who weren't pulling their weight, because I personally was working much harder and longer than any of them. Any shortfall would be made up by me working longer and harder, which I couldn't do and why should I, for less pay.

Now I won't employ older people unless they bear the risk and cost of their under-performing. This means that their market rate, at least in some areas, is not the same as for young people, just as young people's market rate is not the same in some areas as for older people. So just because people prefer young or old age in a particular context doesn't mean there's anything immoral about it. Just as you and the government don't value everyone equally, neither does society.

Will Malcolm King, Cheryl and Killarney personally indemnify me against the risk of employing another old person? Not likely!

Peter Hume has got these guys pegged.

I always thought that bringing in laws against age discrimination were doomed to fail. How the hell are you going to enforce something like that? As long as the employer picks some one out of the people he interviews, without stating that he did it because of their youth there is no way to prove it.

I understand why employers want attractive young people with enormous
Vitality. It is the public image of their business. The public themselves
Are age prejudiced. How many old blokes at the supermarket eye off the old
Girls instead of the young ones. None.

Now whilst understandable, it does present society with a problem. Do Mum and Dad and Grandma and Grandad move back in with their children because they don’t have sufficient funds to eat and house themselves? This is the way of other cultures without welfare. Would some of the employers talking here wish to have their parents move back in with them if things got desperate enough for the old people? I think not.

As was seen in the last big financial crash, the employers here could lose everything too. as well as their investments, savings or superannuation. How will they fare in their old age?

Understand that although you may exercise, eat right etc. The body does wear out and digging holes is just physically impossible for a lot of people in their late 50’s, although there are are always a couple of genetic superbods that can.

You can’t have it both ways, you either have Mum and Dad and Grandma and Grandad move back in with you or you have to employ them or pay them enough through welfare to house, cloth and feed themselves.

Hopefully, future superannuated generations won’t have this problem, but it’s an uncertain world and a war could easily change all that.
My daughter is a manager and has the same opinion as the employers here and says that she would never hire and old person, they are just too slow compared to the young ones.

If you asked a grade 7 child why discrimination is wrong, they would say something like it was unfair because a persons age, gender, religion or colour has nothing to do with merit or their ability to perform a job.

We have laws like this so that employers, like Peter, are not allowed to stuff kids up chimneys or make labourers work 16 hour days.

All of Hume's questions are really just one question: why do we have laws that tell employers what to do? For Peter, laws such as IR torts, taxations laws, OHS laws, traffic laws - indeed the whole of civil society is just a con set up by whacko lefties who are meddling in employers rights to run a slave economy.

Hume's error was also Thatchers. She thought that less laws, less society and less government would mean more freedom and especially more profit for employers. Instead English society became even more dog-eat-dog and this is what Hume is advocating.

Hume's questions such as 'what's wrong with discrimination?' or on another post 'what is the value of trees?' are a childish form of reactionary self referentialism not usually found in mature debates.

While I cannot claim to be an expert on age discrimination, back in the 90s we ran a tourism business and we preferred a mix of older and younger workers. The older workers knew the history of the sites we advertised as well as interesting facts about specific areas. Their expertise meant many return customers.

If people want trees they should have every right to grow them or buy them, and if they don't want them they shouldn't be forced to pay for them.

People should be free to employ old people if they want, and not if they don't want. If you say they are as good as other employees, or better, then go ahead and employ them - which you're not doing, are you?

The issue is, what justifies the use of force - the law - specifically to violate people's freedom of association to force them to obey your opinions?

When asked what is the rational justification of the principle you are contending for, and the use of violence to achieve it, you have NOTHING but hissy fits of spite.

You say you employed older people on their merits. But only because it furthered your purposes. What about if it didn't - like now? Why aren't you employing old people now?

Either stop evading my questions or admit you are wrong.
Why should people's age preferences be criminalised? Spare us your hyperbole. Answer the question.
How do you know it's prejudice? How do you know it's not justified in a given case?
What gives you the right to tell other people what their values should be?
Why don't other people have an equal right to tell you what your preferences should be?
What about your own preferences - should you be imprisoned for them?
How do you know the government isn't wrong?
Should Malcolm King be imprisoned for participating in age-prejudiced programs?
If not, why not?
Why shouldn't age discrimination be illegal for everything else such as choosing a partner as well?
How do you know what wants customers are trying to satisfy by patronising a business, and therefore what are the appropriate characteristics of employees?

Your belief in unprovoked arbitrary violence as the basis of the social good is as invalid as the infantile rage that premises your argument.

"If you asked a grade 7 child why discrimination is wrong, they would say something like it was unfair because a persons age, gender, religion or colour has nothing to do with merit or their ability to perform a job."

Cheryl, how about a sex worker? Has their age, gender, religion or colour got "nothing to do with their merit or ability to perform a job"? How would the grade 7 child know what the employer or the consumer is trying to achieve by performing the job? And why should the decision be made by a grade 7 child, or you, rather than the employer?

Oh, how I love the anti-discrimination theory brigade dictating to the pragmatists.
The pot here is twice as black as the kettle. To disagree with what Peter Hume et al are saying is to disagree with the realities of everyday life.

Peter Hume

‘What are the answer to my questions in my last post? … Just the answers with an admission that you are wrong and hypocritical if you can't answer them.’

‘Either stop evading my questions or admit you are wrong.’

No one has an obligation to jump to arrogant, heavy-handed demands like these. If you wish to treat anyone who disagrees with you as if they are misguided children who need to admit to you how wrong they are, by all means do so if makes you feel good. But don’t expect them to dance to your tune.

CHERFUL

‘You can’t have it both ways, you either have Mum and Dad and Grandma and Grandad move back in with you or you have to employ them or pay them enough through welfare to house, cloth and feed themselves.’

Unfortunately, both of sides of politics, not only in Australia but right across the western democracies, are committed to just that – having it both ways, and more. They continue to push up the retirement age, AND dismantle the welfare state, AND reserve the right to lay off workers as soon as the economy takes a downturn, AND still expect people over 60 to keep working in a workforce that clearly does not wish to employ them.

Sienna

My experience with older (60+) workers is completely at odds with yours. I’ve found the older people I’ve worked with are far more productive than younger people.

Where younger people want to yakkity yak – either via speech or texting – all day long about their drunken night out, their kids’ development, their love lives, their new washing machine and so on … older people just put their heads down and get on with it.

I also like soaking up the on-the-job wisdom of older people. Younger people think they have to change everything for change sake, and waste their own and everyone else’s time trying out their 'totally awesome' innovations. Older people, however, have seen it all before and usually know what will and won’t work before it’s even tried.

The only thing I don’t like about working with older people is witnessing the prejudicial way most younger people treat them.

Actually there was an interesting article in the paper the other day about child labour in India. A lot of children were working labouring in brick kilns and other industrial sites. The government passed laws banning it, whcih no doubt Cherly agrees with, so then there was a big increase in child prostitution and malnutrition caused. Did it ever occur to you that the parents and children aren't doing that kind of work for fun? Making it illegal doesn't magically make them richer, it just means they have to do worse work or go without food. Unless Cheryl's going to send them the money she thinks they should be getting that is. It's the same with child labour in other times or places. Making it illegal to employ them only means is that intead of appearing in the child labour statistics they appear in the child mortality statistics. And it's exactly the same with older employees. If their market rate is lower than eveyrone else's, it's no use trying to force employers to pay more. All it means is that there'll be more unemployment of older people - caused by the Cheryls and Malcolms of this world who don't understand what they're talking about.

The best argument against Peter's libertarian rant against government and the rule of law is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWfh6sGyso

Matt L,

I believe they did the same thing in Britain at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution....children were working then exactly as they are now in places like India - same reasons too. They are nimble and they are cheaper to employ.

But the British government intervened with the Factory Acts and the practice was banned. The object then was to provide schooling, a modicum of education while simultaneously conditioning them to toe the industrial line.

I get your point, but it doesn't make it right

(you might like to pursue some material on child labour in Britain at the time. It's an eye opener - and an indictment on emerging industrial society.)

You see Killarney, there's this thing called reality. If your beliefs don't make logical sense, it doesn't matter how much you want them to be true.

If your beliefs were logical, you would have answered my questions already. But you can't, because you know you will be caught out in self-contradiction and absurdity. That's why you and Cheryl and Malcolm are trying to squirm out of it by evading them. But you don't have the honesty to admit that or be quiet, so you just pretend it's all a matter of opinion.

But the fact you can't answer my questions without contradicting yourself means it's not all a matter of opinion. It just means you're wrong.

But it's worse than that. It means it's you who are actually making conditions worse for older people.

This is because it's you who's trying to have it both ways. On the one hand you want some people to be paid the same as other people whose services are worth more on the market. But on the other hand, you don't want to pay the difference yourself. You want to try to get the money by threatening to physically attack employers to pay for your values that you're not willing to pay for voluntarily. So what you're doing is immoral as well as illogical.

The end result is your ideology causes serious intractable social problems: there's lots of old people who can't be supported by themselves because conceited idiots have criminalised employing them at the market rate; and they can't be supported by the state because the welfare state's social security liabilities are unsustainable. It's a fraudulent scam. If its directors were private, they'd be in prison for a very long time.

At some point, we have to grow up and be adults, and that's when you have to give away your socialist dreams of creating social wealth by thieving, which is all your nasty conceited violent ideology has got to offer.

Wow, Peter!

I see you've lost none of your charm.

(Talk about "serious intractable social problems" - you'd know all about that)

[Deleted. Matthew L is a sock puppet for Peter Hume. Hume or Matthew L or whoever has been banned for participating for 6 months on the forum and will have to come back with a new profile if he/she wants to come back at all.]

[Deleted. Another Peter Hume sock puppet. His/her banning from the forum is now permanent, not just for six months.]

Matt L,

Emerging industrial societies draw people from the countryside where they would have been subsistence farming....and leaves them with those stark choices.

"Monty Python school of economics".....You're such a clever fellow. I'm overwhelmed by your wit. It's not often we're graced by such profound wisdom and banter.....

I am very sad to read of the banning of Peter Hume.

While I condemn his behaviour and the breaking of the OLO rules, I fully agree with his excellent posts, including his last, above.

Myself, I have no patience as Peter to climb the walls, repeatedly explaining such elementary basics as to why state-violence is wrong, to a mob who see no wrong in violence.

All I will say, Cheryl, since Peter is no longer with us to respond in full and I don't possess his patience, is: Yes Indeed - the whole of civil society, UNLESS ONE IS GIVEN THE FREE CHOICE WHETHER OR NOT TO PARTICIPATE IN IT, is indeed a con set up by lefties who are meddling in people's lives, with no moral justification other than the fact that they are able to force themselves on others through sheer violent power. Note that I left the word "whacko" out, as this is deliberate cruelty, rather than the result of some confusion or weakness of mind.

Peter will be greatly missed.

Yuyutsu,

Peter is not "patient".

Peter likes to carefully set out his argument like a banquet. Unfortunately he has no patience for an opposing point of view, and habitually peppers his feasts with invective and denunciation, often accompanied by a side dollop of BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

Strange, the sort of conduct that impresses some people.

(Btw, only "government" intervention in the form of Factory Acts saved British children from diabolical slave labour in the mills. factories and mines....the libertarian manufactures and mill owners perpetuated the cruelties and fought tooth and nail against regulation.)

Dear Poirot,

Freedom implies the ability to do good or to do bad (and everything in between). Yes, ugly capitalism is one of the possible outcomes, but so is heaven on earth (and everything in between).

The materialistic view (and both socialism and capitalism are materialistic in nature) is that the purpose of life is to improve the world (and it's beyond the scope of this article to explain why that is not possible). In contrast, the spiritual view is that we are here in this world in order to improve ourselves, the world itself being merely incidental. We cannot however improve ourselves just by having our hands, feet and mouth move a certain way - we need to INTEND to do better, which can only come by free choice.

By denying someone the freedom to do be a pig, you also deny their chance to become a saint. They may perform the outward actions you want them to perform (and what does it make of you but a slave-master!) but they will never reform this way, never grow. As you have killed their spirit, their very purpose to be here on earth, as you reduced them into dead/inanimate objects, you might as well do them a favour and kill them physically instead.

I don't think we can settle our differences:

For you it seems, that progress occurs when no one is hungry, when all mouths are fed.
For me, progress occurs when the factory-owner changes their heart of stone, overcomes his greed and chooses, out of the goodness of their new heart, to treat his employees well.

No amount of outside pressure can do that.

Yuyutsu,

"For me, progress occurs when the factory owner changes their heart of stone, overcomes his greed and chooses, out of the goodness of their new heart, to treat his employees well."

It's unfortunate, in that case, that we're discussing humans in harness of the will to profit. Not all factory and mill owners were heartless, but it seems that a majority didn't blink an eye to the cruelties inflicted on their workforce, particularly the children.

Here's a piece by John Fielden MP from "The Curse of the Factory System" (1836) (which I've posted before, but it's pertinent here)

"...The small and nimble fingers of little children being by far the most in request, the custom instantly sprang up of procuring "apprentices" from the different parish workhouses of London, Birmingham, and elsewhere....The custom was for the master to clothe his apprentices and to feed and lodge them in an "apprentice house" near the factory; oversees were appointed to see to the works, whose interest it was to work the children to the utmost, because their pay was in proportion to the quantity of work they could extract....cruelties of the most heartrending were practiced upon the unoffending and friendless creatures who were thus consigned to the care of the master-manufacturers; that they were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour, that they were flogged, fettered, and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; that they were, in many cases, starved to the bone while flogged to their work...."

I'm afraid that we'd still be waiting for these factory owners to find their "new hearts" if government regulation hadn't prevailed.

Found this today.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/revealed-industrial-revolution-was-powered-by-child-slaves-2041227.html

Dear Poirot,

Fielden's shocking report does not describe a voluntary situation, freely entered between an "employer" and an "employee". What he describes are acts of violence - a plain criminal activity, which is in fact one of the very few areas where it is legitimate for the government to intervene.

From the ideal spiritual perspective, the best option for those victim-children, their ultimate spiritual gain, would be by turning the other cheek, suffering all that abuse in silence and possibly dying of it.

However, not everyone is at Jesus' level and very few can actually exercise this foremost of options, so as second-best we may turn to self-defense.

What a state is supposed to be (if it is to be legitimate), is a pact between a group of individuals who agree to defend each other (and their children). Whatever right to self-defense those individuals have, they may exercise that right via the mechanism of the state. Naturally, whatever right none of the group has - nor must the state in total have.