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HP Hit With Age-Discrimination Suit Claiming Old Workers Purged (mercurynews.com)
Hewlett-Packard started laying off workers in 2012, before it separated into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise last year. The company has continued to cut thousands of jobs since. As a result of the "restructuring," an age discrimination lawsuit has been filed by four former employees of HP alleging they were ousted amid a purge of older workers. The Mercury News reports: "The goal 'was to make the company younger,' said the complain filed Aug. 18 in U.S. District Court in San Jose. 'In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination [...] and then systematically replacing them with younger employees. HP has hired a disproportionately large number of new employees under the age of 40 to replace employees aged 40 and older who were terminated.' Arun Vatturi, a 15-year Palo Alto employee at HP who was a director in process improvement until he was laid off in January at age 52, and Sidney Staton, in sales at HP in Palo Alto for 16 months until his layoff in April 2015 at age 54, have joined in the lawsuit with a former employee from Washington, removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63. The group is seeking class-action status for the court action and claims HP broke state and federal laws against age discrimination." The lawsuit also alleges that written guidelines issued by HP's human resources department mandated that 75 percent of all hires outside of the company be fresh from school or "early career" applicants.
It's that they're expensive.
fresh from school or "early career" = h1b
Seriously, Tech is bit too wild west to trust over the long term. Live frugal and save like mad. Once you have enough money stashed away to guarantee you won't starve, then work if you want to and it all becomes extra FU money. You can't trust tech as a career beyond 50, and maybe not even to 45 in certain specialties.
Older workers tend to get paid more and have higher health insurance costs. It's probably more about the wage than the age.
Yes, but older workers bring experience to the job that younger workers don't have...
I myself am willing to pay older employees more for that experience. A 50 year old developer who indicates that he/she is willing to continue to learn and improve themselves is a valuable thing to me.
I have hired 65 year olds who want to keep working part time and are bored with retirement...
Age is just a number...
And the decline of the USA continues. Experience shits all over youth. At 22 I couldn't code for shit. At 31 I can do 20x what I could at 22 and my skillsets make actual money instead of junk. US tech companies are vastly overrated. I'd bet that 200 seasoned 40-65 year olds could build a much better OS than Microsoft or Apple could. And they wouldn't fuck up the control panel design either.
then whine about not being able to find talent.....
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If that's their stance, that's like athletes, who pretty much retire around 35 or so. If they don't want old guys as programmers, better pay high salaries to young programmers, just like how athletes get paid. So they can retire or find another job when they are "too old."
Trying to decide whether or not to name names, but in a sense it doesn't matter. As near as I can tell, ALL companies hate old employees. Various companies have various reasons, but I think high-tech companies (like HP and my former employer) might be the most hateful.
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology. Even if the old folks are willing to work as cheaply as fresh hires, and even if the old folks are fast learners, salary cuts are intrinsically demotivating. You can try disguises like "declining health", but they don't work well and job satisfaction tends to decline. Anyway, the bean counters at the top prefer fresh meat. Cheap.
In Japan the situation is especially critical because the demographic transition is resulting in lots of old people and very few young ones. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) has actually put out "guidelines" that strongly encourage companies to keep older employers who want to work until at least age 65, but the companies are just playing games with the rules.
Without naming names, I'm going to try to summarize "a friend's" experiences. For brevity, AF. The managers started pressuring AF to retire around 55, but AF declined. AF's job and working conditions were steadily made worse and then AF was shoved out the door ASAP, which was AF's 60th birthday. The MHLW had a response. Rough translation: "They aren't supposed to do that if AF wanted to keep working, but tough titties."
Anyway, I'm just an old philosopher, so I get to say "That's too bad" to AF. In philosophic terms, there are four quadrants to consider. Everyone wants to be in Q1 with good work and good compensation, and no one wants to be in Q4 with bad work and bad pay. The interesting cases are Q2, good work with bad pay, and Q3, bad work with good pay. AF wanted Q1 or Q2, but got shoved into Q3 and then Q4.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness. Insofar as most of my career was spent in Q1 and Q2, I can't complain too much. However, at this point it appears that my best outcome is to pass away before I exhaust my savings. I would contribute more to the economy if my new focus wasn't on minimizing my expenses, eh? You'd think the companies might be smart enough to worry about the loss of business from all of those penny-pinching retirees, but they obviously aren't that smart.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Step closer so that I can hit you with my cane.
true, but most 40+ would not sit quietly and work 80h/week on a poorly managed project. People with experience seen too much to stand by it. Some companies fix this problem by getting 22y/o and work 3 shifts for same pay. Some get better management.
fresh out of school:
+ willing to work some to much OT without extra pay
+ will settle for less pay and benefits
+ cheap to replace if necessary
+ unlikely to give a big fight if fired ("easy to fire")
+ little to no lost assets if fired or quits
+ more open to new ideas and changing tech
+ cheaper insurance costs
experienced / old-timers:
+ heavilty trained and experienced at their position. efficient. certified.
+ has learned "the big picture" in operations, understands subtle effects and can head off future problems
+ has valuable and possibly unique organizational knowledge (undocumented information and processes)
+ has formed working relationships with other employees, improved efficiency and communications
+ more reliable attendance
+ less likely to leave suddenly
But the big issue I have with this article is how they act so surprised that a company more frequently ends up replacing someone with another person that's younger. Um, people get old. If you keep replacing your workforce with people of the same or greater age, eventually you're going to be running on a staff of people all hanging around retirement age. You have to get new blood in continuously, it's required for a business to continue. I don't see validity in calling "age descrimination" on hiring. On selective firing, YES, definitely. But not on hiring. I don't agree with the "equal opportunity employer" thing, I believe that a company/owner should be able to decide who they hire. Once you've established the business relationship with them, then some rules need to kick in, to avoid "disposable/throwaway employee" resource issues.
A lot of companies seem to see their HR as a source of funding they can tap into when times get tough, "reducing staffing costs" by canning the seniors and hiring cheap replacements. This rarely works out well for them. They don't need government rules to bring the pain, they bring it to themselves. Radio Shack just got done committing "suicide by seniority-culling". They fired everyone that either was doing well or knew how to run the stores, and replaced them with cheap labor that was inexperienced, idiot, or both. (they did several other stupid things that are OT, but this was one of the "big three" that took them down) And down they went. It's a self-limiting problem. If HP wants to lobotomize their human resources, I say let them. We'll see them bought out under duress after they tank a few years from now by someplace like walmart.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I have old age, treachery _and_ skill, while most (not all) young ones have youth and nothing else...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not every position requires "experience". Do you think McDonald's would hire MBAs as cashiers at quadruple the price of their other cashiers because they would value the "experience"? The MBA's real talents would be completely squandered in that role. This is an extreme example, of course, but it works for other positions as well. You wouldn't hire someone with a PhD in Computer Science, specializing in artificial intelligence, so that they could do odd jobs like write a tool for IT to help manage their inventory. You wouldn't take someone who is qualified as a principal software lead and make them do grunt work like a junior engineer.
Lower positions pay less and older people, who are accustomed to being paid more, are more likely to have a high churn rate in such positions. If a person is used to making $130,000, you might be able to hire them on at $80,000-90,000, but how long do you think they'll stick around? It would be a safe bet to say they turned right around and started applying to other places to try to get back to $130,000, and as soon as that kind of opportunity comes around they'll be gone. Poof.
Meanwhile, someone who is early in their career will negotiate their way up to $72,000 and be proud of themselves for getting so much. You save $10-20k, get someone who is qualified for the work, and they'll probably stick around longer and try to work their way up (or not - some people aren't very ambitious).
In software, you can't have 100% of your engineers being software leads or being paid as software leads. But over time, especially for a large company like HP, the higher tiers can start filling up. Managers don't want to fire their employees if they're doing good work, and employees continually want more money. So as their salaries go up, no one is really saying "We can't pay you that much, so you're fired", so that employee ends up getting a minimal raise and kept around a little while longer. But if the amount of work isn't growing, then the top tier that's filling up will eventually get too full. And when your company is looking at restructuring/reorganizing/layoffs, it's natural to then look at every layer and see if it's appropriately staffed. If you've held on to a bunch of people for far too long, then the odds are better than good that the lower tiers are understaffed while the higher tiers are overstaffed. Which will naturally lead to laying off old people and hiring younger people.
It's just a harsh reality that a business doesn't have infinite money to pass around. They can't afford to give $140,000 to someone working a position that's worth $80,000, even if the person really is worth $140,000. That would be wasteful to both the individual(who isn't using all their talents) and company(which is overpaying for a role).
People are trying to ascribe some sort of intense cruelty or malice to this when that isn't necessarily the case. Some business people are ruthless...but do we know that's the case in this situation? I don't think so.