Word: agee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...financial disabilities of old age were first recognized as a serious social problem by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who initiated the social security pension system in 1884. He arbitrarily set the age for receiving benefits at 65, and his model has been followed ever since in much of the Western world. The same age for receiving benefits?and therefore being a candidate for forced retirement?was enshrined in the U.S. Social Security system when it was established in 1935, and was copied in almost all the private pension plans that mushroomed after World War II. Yet in Bismarck...
Tektronix Inc., an electronics firm in Oregon and the state's largest private employer, allows all its 15,900 workers to pick their own date of retirement, provided they are doing a satisfactory job. "We don't make generalized assumptions about age and its effect on productivity," says Susan Stone, director of communications. "We try to focus on the employee and his manager rather than set hard and fast rules. It's a pay-for-performance situation. We have people over 65 doing a heck of a job, no matter where we put them." Texas Refinery, a petroleum-products manufacturer...
...matter how good or bad a worker may be, at a certain age he goes, and that's the end of it. But now even the most paternalistic company may feel compelled to rate much more sternly the performance of older employees. Such performance evaluations are subjective at best and open to rebuttal. Says Madeleine Hemmings, director of employee benefits for the National Association of Manufacturers: "That's going to make for a very uncomfortable workplace. We'll have to keep records and document the mistakes people make. We'll have to do that to protect ourselves." This...
...worker, perhaps no less trying would be a situation in which he is downgraded at the office for a decade or more. Many companies already exert subtle and not so subtle pressure on older people to get them to retire. Says Detroit Attorney V. Paul Donnelly, who specializes in age-discrimination cases involving white-collar workers: "If they are going to do you in by age 53 and make you worthless, increasing the retirement age is not the answer. I believe it means nothing...
Much of the U.S. pension system, hammered out over years of onerous labor negotiations, will have to be reviewed. This is the reason, initially at least, the AFL-CIO opposed changing the retirement age. The unions have fattened pensions and won other concessions by trading off such payments against a mandatory retirement age. Now, if people work past 65, actual pension costs will decrease. But salary costs will rise, since older workers are generally the highest paid. More will have to be budgeted for health insurance. John Bragg, president of the Life Insurance Co. of Georgia, speculates that a full...