No other single law has done more to debunk the “myths of the worn-out worker,” as a one-time AARP writer put it, than the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). As a deterrent to crafty employers seeking to downsize, or as a legal defense in the courts, the ADEA has helped chip away at views of older workers as rigid, inadaptable, slow and accident-prone, views that color attitudes toward them and prevent us from seeing them as a valuable resource. The ADEA put teeth behind the notion that employees, particularly those above 40, should be judged on their abilities, not their age, a signature AARP principle.
An offspring of the civil rights era, the ADEA has stood for four decades as the primary guarantor of the rights of older workers. It has gracefully weathered judicial tinkering over the years, and has succeeded in fulfilling its statutory purpose: to protect workers older than 40 from arbitrary age discrimination.
