In Judy Peres’ excellent article “Laying off older workers, legally” (Page 1, Dec. 8), there are serious flaws in the reasoning of the judge cited in the article. The judge stated that because decision-making on costs is essential to a market economy, the termination of Robert Sola at age 56 should stand.
First, the judge’s ruling could be universally applied, and if universally applied, the ruling would reverse all anti-discrimination legislation. For example, the discomfort of white employees with black co-workers could be turned into a number indicating a loss of productivity and a direct cost, and this could be used as a reason for not hiring black employees.
I’m not sure IBM, the company that laid off Sola, would be comfortable with this result, although there are forces in society today that would be all too comfortable with it. These forces, though, would mask their racism and ageism with rhetoric about “wealth creation.”
Furthermore, the judge neglected the business irrationality of IBM’s decision, even when “cost control” is to be treated as all-important.
One area in which IBM failed because of ageism was the Year 2000 crisis, in which its mainframe systems will fail to calculate dates correctly after Jan. 1, 2000. IBM is now trying to catch up, but resolving this crisis requires the skill of older programmers, managers and systems developers familiar with the languages and systems in which the problem occurs. It was caused in part by terminating and reassigning programmers who could have fixed examples of the problem in seconds: IBM is now hiring youngsters who must be taught the older systems.
IBM incurs a real cost when it age-discriminates. The fact that this cost may not appear on the books does not make it unreal. If the judge’s ruling stands, companies who want in the future to indulge in age, race and sex discrimination need only to cook the books to demonstrate the needed result.
