Word: peppers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...House of Representatives may be the session's most important piece of legislation, with ramifications no one can foresee. It extends the mandatory retirement age from 65 to 70 in private industry and removes it altogether for federal employees. Said the bill's sponsor, Florida Democrat Claude Pepper, 77: "At long last, we will have eliminated ageism as we have previously eliminated sexism and racism as a basis for discrimination in this country, and we will be putting a new emphasis on human rights...
...Pepper claims to speak for the 23 million Americans-almost 11% of the population-who are 65 and over. He complains that, oddly enough, these citizens were left exposed to unfair treatment by some past reform legislation: the 1967 law that forbade discrimination in the hiring and firing of people under 65 in private industry because of age, thus penalizing people over 65. Pepper has pushed through the House Education and Labor Committee a bill that would bar forced retirement in the private sector until age 70 and eliminate the mandatory retirement at that age that now applies...
Such an extension of the standard U.S. working life would not be universally applauded. Although AFL-CIO Boss George Meany, now 82, is hardly a per suasive personal advocate of early retirement, Big Labor has quietly opposed the Pepper bill. The bill could also create a policy problem for liberals like Senator Hubert Humphrey who have long called for achievement of full employment through a planned economy-a goal that would become all the more difficult and costly if a lot of elderly job seekers were to enter or stay in the labor force. At present, some 2.8 million...
Bright Talents. Proponents of the Pepper bill argue that its impact on younger workers will be modest, partly because generous pension plans, early retirement programs and other inducements have been drawing people out of the work force at ever earlier ages. For instance, at GM, where an assembly-line worker can retire after 30 years' service, irrespective of age, only 2% of the company's 748,000 employees actually stay on the payroll until...
...same time, Pepper-plan advocates make some telling economic and social arguments for later retirement. A retired couple, both 65, who live solely on Social Security payments, must scrape by on a bare-bones average income of $400 a month, or $4,800 a year. Some 3.3 million elderly people exist on incomes that are below the individual poverty level of $2,730 a year. By allowing these people to work, the pro-Pepper argument goes, some of the pressure on the strapped Social Security system would be relieved...