Posted on 03/07/2007 2:34:46 PM PST by qam1
What happens when a twenty-something manager tells an older worker to turn up her hearing aid or take an herbal memory medicine? In this Oregon case, it got the employer in trouble with the feds.
Scott and Patty Corp., formerly Woodburn Fertilizer, Inc., agreed recently to pay Carolyn Arzino, a former longtime 55-year-old accounting secretary, $85,000 to settle age discrimination claims brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The case arose, agency trial attorney Teri Healy told The Oregonian, from the actions of a female manager in her 20s, who criticized Arzino's work, telling her, among other things, that she should take ginkgo biloba, an herbal memory tonic, and turn up the volume on her Miracle Ear.
The manager gave Arzino a poor performance evaluation, withheld her raise and placed her on a 30-day probation before firing her on July 20, 2004, according to the EEOC's complaint. But EEOCs investigation revealed that Arzinos coworkers said she was an exceptional performer.
Scott and Patty Corp. denied liability.
This case, noted EEOC district director Joan Ehrlich, illustrates a phenomenon of today's workplace: It spans four generations -- Millennials, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the last of the Silent Generation born before the end of World War II -- and their members don't always speak the same language or work quite the same way. Employers need to be aware and sensitive to those dynamics.
You get it. The little girl in the article, apparently doesn't, and that about says it.
Age discrimination does happen.
When I was in my mid 40's, I had a female supervisor of about the same age. Some people collect baseball cards, some people collect stamps. She collected boy toys for her office. On one occasion, she put me on a particularly odious job instead of one of her 20-something pets. She told me right to my face, "that's no job for a young guy".
Maybe I should have sued the b***h.
I can't bust on you.... I always enjoyed your point of view and posts.
Some things just get to me--like when my wife took Beel Richardson's (another boomer) Roadrunner Train into Albuquerque. She related to me that the train was just full of middle-aged women with short haircuts and balding middle-aged men with white goatees and she had to stand, with her hugely pregnant belly, the whole way.
Not a single boomer (nobody loves public transportation more than old hippies) offered her a seat.... Now that is rude.
Yeah, and how could they put me, as a 22 year old Lieutenant, in charge of an entire platoon of men?!
When I was younger, I really used to look up to 'seasoned citizens', they were survivors of the Depression, WWII, Korea. People of substance.... I looked up to them, I still do. My dad was a Korea vet.
Now the weird hippies from when I was born are weird old hippies, but still protesting "The War". I realized I don't need more respect, we need a better crop of oldsters.
But it is funny when they stamp their arthritic feet and try to wrinkle their bo-toxed foreheads....
kent state = good start.
Awww.... Now you're going to make them cry out of their startled-looking botoxed Nancy Pelosi eyes.
They love that "Tinsoldiers and Nixon's Comin'" song.....
This 20 something was a loose cannon and a Hostile Work Environment Lawsuit waiting to happen. Her superiors should have seen her for the liability she became. She may have had the fire in the belly, but she had no wisdom behind it and no tact. The 55 yr old women strikes me as the type that kept the company running smoothly, an unsung hero.
"This case, noted EEOC district director Joan Ehrlich, illustrates a phenomenon of today's workplace: It spans four generations -- Millennials, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers and the last of the Silent Generation born before the end of World War II -- and their members don't always speak the same language or work quite the same way."
80 posts and four and one-half hours and not one poster has addressed the author's central theme; which is that while the demands of the workplace are still focused on the common target of days past, attitudes, styles, values and practices have changed without a directed, linear path to that common target.
Meanwhile, oversight has evolved to encompass every grievance or complaint that can be made to fit within the confines of convolution so inimical to enterprise and creativity to bring us to a point of contentious confusion rather than a common conclusion.
Soon, we'll revisit the era of the unconcerned outsider who simply passes the masses by and blazes a trail unimagined while the rest of the world, caught unawares, scrambles to keep pace.
sorry, Joni
Play or fold, you only get one hand.
"Sometimes "nothin'" is a pretty cool hand...."
They weren't such a bad sort, in a way; no worse than a fog on an otherwise quite sunny day.
Sorry dude but I was never a hippie. As a teen in the midwest in the 60's, I never ever met one either. I think the press blew it out of proportion. You'll have to find a better excuse for picking on your elders.
Just keep reading :)
all society's ills today - drugs, abortion, STD's, etc - go back to the boomer generation.
You intrigue me; if it be purpose you seek or understanding you are in good and traditional company, but experience teaches either patience or inspires madness.
LOL!!. But I really do wonder about that hippie story. It must have been only on the left and right coasts and some college campuses. I'll never forget watching George Harrison on the DVD anthology say he got excited about Haight-Ashbury and went there to find enlightened thinking. What he found was a bunch of dirty drugged up people and was VERY disappointed that the hippie culture was a myth. It still is.
As tehey say... Old age and cunning will outdo youth and skill every time...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.