The Aging Factor Case Study

The Aging Factor As employees are choosing to stick with their careers much longer than those in past generations, employer policies, procedures, and behaviors have become more scrutinized around the issue of age discrimination. While many organizations are committed to hiring, promoting and retaining older workers, some have elected to covertly remove them from their workforce. The following is such an example, resulting in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filing an age discrimination suit against AT&T on behalf of 53 year old Terry Pierce.

AT&T Corporate Statistic American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) is one of the world’s largest communication companies. The company provides voice coverage in over 225 countries, data

Along with the monetary remunerations, AT&T agreed to “redistribute its anti-discrimination policy with a message from its equal employment director reaffirming the company’s commitment to the policy” (McGuinness, 2013, para. 2). Also, the company pledged to provide anti-dicrimination training and report to the EEOC any termination of individuals over 40 years of age (2013). Understanding the monetary impact of income loss to discriminated individuals would take an unbias and general prespective of any evaluation. Consequently, without thoroughly knowing Terry Pierce’s compensation, time away from position, and other overall damages, it is hard to assess the equibility of this settlement. Nevertheless, section 1981a of the ADEA caps compensatory and punitive damages , depending on emplouer size, to $50,000 to $300,000 (Harper, 2012). However, at first blush, it would appear that the settlement was in line, or even above other age discrimination suits of a like

Moreover, top managers must be made aware of their role in modeling a general negative age-discrimination environment throughout the organiztion (Kunze, Boehm, & Bruch, 2013). Therefore, each and every manager must participate in a comprehensive training program which focuses on discrimination behaviors and methods to avoid such demeanors. Moreover, organizations must invest in “instituional diversity management programmes, trainings, and workshops to mitigate the perception of dicrimintaiton and spur performance” (Kunze, Boehm, & Bruch, 2013, p. 435). Hence, companies must be committed to allow resources and time for all employees to understand and support anti-discrimination initiatives within the