Have to agree with WmTrevor:
As a young man working through my holidays, to supplement a limited budget, I got a well paid job stacking 350lb bales of wool.
Heavy gut busting work that required two healthy and reasonably strong young men, working together, to accomplish!
By the morning tea break, myself and my companion were shaking with fatigue.
An older man, around 75, came up to us and explained, we were doing it all wrong, and that there was a better way, which he proceeded to demonstrate, ON HIS OWN.
That better way saw us building a stairway of bales and rolling the rest of the bales up them, using our knees to assist with the lifting process, which was then relatively easy.
There is simply no substitute for experience, regardless of the job description.
Had we been like some of today's university educated, know it all, young Turk employers, we would have told the old bloke to go take a flying french frankfurter.
We always lose when we undervalue experience!
Experience is worth much more than any piece of paper in untried, untested, unproven intellectual concepts?
By the way, the easiest way to recognize incompetence, is by the number of super competent assistants the incompetent surrounds him/herself with. [3 or more, a dead giveaway!] And always has someone else to blame, whenever mistakes are made!
Too many of today's employers have no relevant experience, and therefore have no concept of the work effort required, or the actual time needed to accomplish virtually any task.
As for older persons not being as savvy when it comes to technology, they can and do learn!
Their alleged slowness, more than compensated for, with their other life skills and people handling experience!
I remember a firm called Francklin's, who would not hire juniors.
They reasoned that the older more experienced senior, would make less mistakes, give better customer service, and more than offset any savings, with efficiency gains.
One notes, for the lifetime of Francklin's, they never had cause to regret or change that most pragmatic of employment policies!
Rhrosty.

Gerontophobia is the new sexism and racism. Why else would somebody write "The fact is, older people are not the same as younger people and there’s no reason why employers should not prefer younger." Men are not the same as women; whites supremacists are not the same as aboriginals; able bodied people are not the same as disabled. For goodness sake grow up.

Age is not, and should never be the issue any more than gender or race. It should be about knowledge, skills and aptitude and attitude - and who will do a good job and who will be of greatest value to the employer and society in general.

Yuyutsu
It’s a valid point that corporations are not natural persons and don’t presumptively have any moral right to be treated as such. But I don’t think it’s valid to conclude from that, that therefore government is justified in threatening to punish people for preferring to associate voluntarily with younger rather than older people, for two reasons.

First, all the legal benefits of incorporation could be achieved in effect by contract. The only exception is limitation of liability in tort (think Bhopal). To the extent that this governmental conferral of legal privilege to avoid liability is unjust – and I don’t see how anyone can avoid that conclusion – the remedy is to abolish it, not to add other misuses of power somewhere else.

Since the supposed wrong of preferring younger to older employees is in contract, and therefore is not dependent on the fact of incorporation, therefore there is no justification in restricting the rights of corporations to exercise such preferences since they could do it even if they weren’t incorporated.

Secondly, if it's wrong to exercise the human right of freedom of association in such a way as to prefer younger over older, then why only criminalise it in employment, or in corporations? Why not in all social relations? For example, if a young woman chooses her sexual partner on the basis of preferring a younger to an older man, shouldn't that be a criminal offence too? The absurd principle is the same throughout.

SHORT&SHARP
So why don't you employ them then? The issue is whether coercion is justified.

All
No-one has established anything wrong with preferring younger to older voluntary associations.

It is sad. Yes I have experienced this, for at least the last 10 to 15 years. I am now 65. I have not been accepted for a new job or given a promotion in my current workplace during that period. I kept trying and only gave up trying five years ago. It has been demoralising.

I'm working daily with younger people who have been promoted over me, and whose knowledge, skills and experience are far inferior to mine. Such is the wisdom of our younger managers here.

My sense of it: this sort of manager gets the employes that they want and that they deserve. They get poorer results and at times shocking failures as a result. The failures are brushed under the carpet and not spoken of, to save them from embarrassment.

I live with this awareness in my workplace daily. I work with such younger managers daily. I have no time for them, feel contempt rather; remain cordial and avoid personal interaction with them as much as reasonably possible.

Our workplace could be so much better than this, if not for age discrimination by young managers who are cleary terrified of ageing themselves and who inevitably will age themselves. With closed minds such as theirs, they may not necessarily; live in denial rather, as they do with their failures.

If there is any justice in it for me, it is that I cannot see this sort of manager ever enjoying old age.

in my early 30s, I did some work in Shepparton picking pears. In our crew, there was a bloke who'd come down from Qld, very tall and lean, didn't smoke, drink or gamble but who'd regularly pick the most bushels of any of us, then he'd go up to NSW picking apples before finally going back to Qld for the winter.

and he never once whinged about anything.

As Hanns Johst memorably (nearly) said, when I hear the words Human Rights, I release the safety on my Browning.

The problem with "Human Rights" is that they are a confection, created by people who have decided that the "real world" is something that they can idealize, and then invent, through a series of Conventions, Symposia, Conferences, Round-Tables and the like.

It isn't.

Life is what happens to ordinary people, every day. Some of it is tough to handle, and on very rare occasions it can be "unfair". But it cannot - should not - be legislated. Especially by a bunch of academics and lawyers whose understanding of business can be etched on the head of a pin, with room to spare.

That way lies tyranny.

I have been been running my own businesses for the last couple of decades. I have never age-discriminated, or practised any other form of discrimination in hiring competent people, in any of my businesses. If they are the best fit for the job, it doesn't matter to me whether they are young, old, male, female (or neither) First Fleeters, fresh off the boat, whatever.

But it has to be said, yes, I have tended to employ younger people. Not because of the stereotypes, but because they actually do apply themselves more thoroughly to the tasks, they are willing to learn - and learn, and learn - and most importantly, they identify themselves closely with the success of the business.

The day the government tells me whom I should employ, or gives me a hiring quota of men, women, old, young, black, white, straight, GLBTI or whatever, is the day I shall withdraw whatever is left of my capital, and put all my employees out on the streets.

Except they'd probably have the energy, nous and get-up-'n-go to buy out the businesses themselves, and make a cracking good go of it.