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When I think of age discrimination, I think of retired grocery bag packers working in large grocery stores. They stand their stoically opening bag and neatly stacking your groceries in while offering the shopper a genuine smile. Most people wonder why they should even bother to smile since they are packing groceries and look as if they had been doing a more important job before retireing. I have now a better idea of why they are smiling.

They are smiling because they are able to save part of their retirment benefits while supplementing their spendable income by packing bags. And, even though they have willingly stepped down from their former position, they are still being harassed by checkout clerks and younger grocery store workers who see the senior worker as a threat.

Many older workers are being harassed, threatened, intimidated, and given the cold shoulder at work by younger workers. The point of their targetting older workers is to force their early retirement or worse yet to get them fired and to lose their retirement. Even substitute teachers who had retired as full time teachers are greeted by former colleagues with, you came back as a substitute? The harassment doesn't just end with fellow teachers but extends to the principal and is carefully spread to the student body to not give the old substitute the same and equal courtesy of another teacher or even of a younger substitute.

I can only write about work situations that I know about, but, I am sure, that such deliberate targetting of older workers extends to other workplaces as well. The problem is one of societal attack on those individuals who have memories of things like the Second World War, of Nixon's quitting instead of facing impeachment, of Clinton being impeached and saved by Ronald Reagan's wheelchaired gunshot staff member! I think that there is a deliberate attack of older workers and that it is political.

Most people whether young or old are fearful of facing secret attacks and ostrazation by those who are in a position to order it. If they see that a movement is underfoot to harass older workers out of the workplace, they will join in the movement much like a herd of swine being led over a cliff.

And speaking of cliffs, I think that considering the dire situation of America's workplace economy, it would behoove those older Americans who still can to change policy and to encourage older workers to return to work by offering them work. I , for example, would love to be offered a full time job at a newspapers editing propaganda laced with deliberate misleading articles. It could be this old person's new goal in life.

Learn more about this author, Nora Nick Katsourakis.
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