INDUSTRIAL AGE

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 150, 21 December 1929, Page 8

INDUSTRIAL AGE

ARMY OF UNEMPLOYED

TOO OLD AT FORTY-FIVE

(From "The Post's" Representative.) , NEW YOBK, 13th November. "Too old at 45!" In this age of young men and massed production, many hundreds of thousands of men ,are unemployed for the reason assigned by employers that the efficiency of the individual wanes at the age of 45 years. A controversy about this phase of American industrial life has been going on actively for the past two years. It remained for Pennsylvania, the most industrialised of all the States, to take up the cause of the distressed individual. The Director of Labour, in an investigation extending over eighteen months, discovered that there were 100,000 men between the ages of 42 and 52 years out of work in that State alone. The great majority he found capable of doing the job 'from which they were dismissed, but on inquiring from employers, was invariably met with the retort, "We never employ a man over 45."

Realising the seriousness of the situation, the official started out on a campaign and elicited a pledge from 3000 employers that, other things being equal, they would.regard efficiency as the sole index of availability. The campaign is now moving to other States, as it is realised tljat the too-old-at-45 rule debars a large number of ex-service men from jobs. 'At Pittsburgh, the Birmingham of America, the rule is in pretty general use. Employers explain that workers' compensation rates are very high, that a man of 30 years is more agile and less prone to accident than a man in the forties. It does not apply so generally, however, in the less hazardous occupations. Many big firms in this category have pension schemes and retire their employees at 60 or 65 on annuities.

An investigation by the Federal Department of Labour at Washington is about to begin; it will produoe some interesting sidelights on a national problem that offsets to a material extent the prevailing idea abroad of tha industrial . proseprity of the United States.