Age Discrimination

1^st October 2006

Today’s the day that the new age discrimination regulations come into force. As from now, discrimination in the workplace on the grounds of age will be prohibited. I think this is an excellent idea; I’ve never had any time for discrimination and I struggle to see how it can ever really be justified. I can understand why you’d higher people who were more qualified, or who had more experience, but simply because of their age? That doesn’t seem fair to me. There was this guy on Newsnight the other night bemoaning the new regulations – he was from some business organisation – and saying there was no need for the law to get involved, and that the elderly should be allowed to “go with dignity” instead of dragging their grievance to the courts when they get made redundant for being too old. What an idiot that man was. Whenever there’s a problem of discrimination, the law has to get involved. As if big business is voluntarily going to accept the problem of ageism and age discrimination; if it did, and had sorted the problem out, then there’d be no need for these new regulations. The force of law is the only thing that’s going to make these businesses change their attitudes and practices, and I welcome these changes.