The Importance Of Employment Discrimination

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Are older people entitled to protection from employment discrimination as a class? How might a law protecting older people from discrimination work?

According to Wikipedia, Discrimination is treating people differently. Employment discrimination is treating one person better than another because of their age, gender, race, religion or other protected class status.

Age discrimination refers to the actions taken to deny or limit opportunities to people on the basis of age. These are usually actions taken as a result of one 's ageist beliefs and attitudes. Age discrimination occurs on both a personal and institutional level.

However, an older person may be told that he or she is too old to engage in certain physical activities, like an informal game of basketball between friends and family. A younger person may be told they are too young to get a job or help move the dining room table. On an institutional level, there are policies and regulations in place that limit opportunities to people of certain ages and deny them to all others. The law, for instance, requires that all young person must be at least 16 years old in order to obtain a driver 's license in the United States. There are also government regulations that determine when a worker may retire. Currently, in the US, a worker must be between 65 and 67 years old (depending upon his or her birth year) before becoming eligible for Social Security retirement benefits, but some company pension plans begin benefits

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