No office hours today
_________________________
Age inequalities (work-related)
- EU job guarantee -- country implementation plans : help for under 30s only
- Mandatory retirement
Or are they unfair, discriminatory, wrong, bad...
Juliana Bidadanure
Saul Levmore
Martha Nussbaum
_________________________
EU job guarantee
Imagine: a resentful 40 year old. What would Bidadanure say to him?
Her principles of justice
- Approximate generational equality
- Prudential Lifespan Account
- lifespan efficiency principle--early interventions have diachronic benefits (most relevant principle)
- Relational justice --no dominating, demeaning, stigmatizing, etc.
_________________________
More on the Prudential Lifespan Account
Imagine these authors looking at these policies--
- Michael Slote
- Simone DeBeauvoir
- Cicero
_________________________
Mandatory retirement
- Where legal, where illegal?
- Illegal in the US since 1986
- With exceptions for certain professions (pilots, air traffic controllers, military
- legal in many countries--e.g. Finland
_________________________
What does Bidadanure say about mandatory retirement?
"although mandatory retirement could be justified in principle on grounds of diachronic fairness, the strategy only makes sense if we have good reasons to believe that it can plausibly lead to reduced unemployment rates for the young. For most employment sectors, however, the evidence points in the other direction, and so our default position should be to reject the coercive policy as lacking justification as a way to improve the young's prospects." (p. 178)
- If it did help the young, mandatory retirement would be OK because It would be supported by the Prudential Lifespan Account and lifespan efficiency
- not ruled out by relational justice, not demeaning to old people
_________________________
Saul Levmore & Martha Nussbuam, Aging Thoughtfully
Martha Nussbaum -- 69 when she wrote this, still working at 78
Read passage on p. 68 --
- Mandatory retirement "is one of the great moral evils of our times"
What would she say to Bidadanure?
- Bidadanure: relational justice--policies should not be demeaning to any age group
- Nussbaum: mandatory retirement IS demeaning! Read p. 61-62
- "my romance with work" .... "I'm talking mainly about work that the worker experiences as meaningful" (p. 62)
- Japanese workers over 100
Why are Finnish people satisfied with mandatory retirement?
- great health care system
- applies equally to everyone
- adaptive preferences -- if you can't avoid X, you avoid resenting it by cultivating a preference for X; the preference is "adaptive"
_________________________
Saul Levmore--
- "employers and employees should be able to contract as they like" (p. 46)
- people should be able to choose employment contracts with mandatory retirement
- currently illegal in the US
- this would boost employment of older workers
Nussbaum's objection:
- contracts will vary--more desirable employees won't have retirement clauses
- therefore opt-in mandatory retirement will be stigmatizing and demeaning
