Seriously. The constant stream of LinkedIn announcements from people who hit 50 is shocking. It’s like happy birthday and here’s your pink slip.
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The layoffs are engineered in such a way that they avoid ageism complaints. For the layoff in 2017 an analysis of the ages of who was let go formed a perfect bell curve. It has age as the median being the exact center between collage graduation day at 22 and retirement at 65. The least were let go at the low and the high end of the age range and the most at the median. The median and average were the same and lent to the perfect symmetry of the curve.
It appears that they decide how many people in each age group need to be let go to achieve this symmetry on the curve and avoid age discrimination suits. Basically, you have to lay off a bunch of younger folks to eliminate the older ones and avoid litigation.
I believe ageism is alive and well at Nike - especially in tech. Proving it is yet another matter.
It is incredibly difficult to prove. Especially when you have an HR department and management team that know how to get their “ducks in a row” before making any moves to let people go.
I saw this week's Business Insider article about new discrimination claims continuing to come in to the lawyer working on the existing gender discrimination class action.
I fully expect that an additional class action suit will develop around the age discrimination issue that has been going on the past few years.
For many Nike vets, the 50/20 (50 yrs old or 20 years experience) rule during the last layoff. Those employees were advised they could keep all their vested stock if they signed a document stating they would not sue for age discrimination.
I guess the point is how many of the 40+ vets are left? Not many. There’s only a few hundred left over 20yrs service after last layoff. I would bet %ttl 50+ workers is extremely low. Single digit. Age tenure and time in band (regardless of lack of movement in org over the past 5 yrs) will pretty much determine your fate.
I am 58 years old and still work at nike. Didn't they just gave their highest award to the 40+ year Nike vets?
Because first they need to work through their gender based class action suit. That is still out there people!
Allstate should also be worried. With the layoffs at Allstate almost two years ago, the vast majority were 50+ years old and making $80-90,000. Case is being looked at/explored in CA