REPARATIONS, NOT AGE DISCRIMINATION by Peter D. Moss . Senate Age discrimination in employment is fundamentally different from other kinds of employment discrimination. Race and gender discrimination is based on prejudice, an erroneous belief among white male executives that minorities and women are generally less qualified than white males. Handicap discrimination is also based on prejudice, but complicated by two economic misperceptions. Work place and work station modifications for the handicapped may appear too costly, and the health, health care and attendance record of the handicapped may also be mistaken as an extra cost. By contrast, age discrimination in employment, or job ageism, is wholly economically motivated. The chronic failure of the American Association of Retired Persons to "convince" the nation's corporations that older employees make good employees is easily explained as preaching to the choir because corporations know better than the AAUP that employees' performance and attendance does not suddenly drop on their 40th birthday. Job ageism is wholly economically motivated: replacing a 60-year old managerial, administrative or professional earning $60,000 with a 30-old earning $30,000 and having similar qualifications on paper saves $30,000 salary and $10,000 in fringe benefits, and that $40,000 over 10 years is close to half a million bucks. Some estimates of job ageism put the number as 10 million victims but no accurate figure is available because the business and government officials who should be collecting and publishing statistics are motivated against highlighting the illegal outrage of job ageism. But multiplying 10 million victims with half a million loss per victim comes to 5 trillion extra profit not subject to taxation. We are talking real money. Today's U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is only 3 trillion per year, so 5 trillion extra profit over the years is still a good bit of change for job ageists and their victims. How have the IBMs and the Xeroxes and all megacorporations without known exception gotten away with such outrageous and illegal mass discrimination? There are several answers. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and 50 state "Human Rights" shams have always been headed by minorities and women tested to be pro-corporate lackeys protecting the profits of the corporate discriminators, not the rights of victims. The African-American EEOC chair Clarence Thomas made it a policy to delay the processing of innumerable age complaints past the statute of limitations so victims could no longer sue, for which he was rewarded with a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court by President George Bush Sr. And speaking of courts, they are even more guilty. Many years ago, in a case known as McDonnell Douglas versus Greene, the U.S. Supreme Court laid down insurmountable burdens of proof which the judges knew that few or no job discrimination victims could meet. U.S. District Courts and U.S. Courts of Appeal, regularly staffed by "conservative" judges who were megacorporate defense lawyers, took the hint and unjustly dismissed innumerable age victims suits. Anybody who says that the system was and is rigged against victims is guilty of understatement. I was personally involved in several federal age cases and I plan to expose the set-up in a future book. One of the side effect is psychological, dental and medical damage from judicial abuses that I suffered during a 9-year case that should have been settled in 5 minutes but then how could corporate defense lawyers become millionaires? When I last looked, there were about 10 major law firms specializing in torturing job discrimination victims into illness and submission and often destitution. But what does the corporate defense lawyer do to keep his "defense" going for 9 years? First, there is "discovery" which is supposed to ascertain the facts in the case. When my wife aged 54 was replaced by a single 27 year old girl illegally brought in from the German parent company, there was not much to discover. So what did the lawyer do? What they always do: investigate the victim's life history to find something, anything, that could be misconstrued and then misrepresented to a jury. The assumption is that anybody old enough to be a victim of age discrimination in employment (40 or older) had to have something in his/her past, like a disgruntled former employer or résumé fraud (claiming non-existent qualifications). It took this lawyer nine years to find that there was nothing to find in my wife's 54 year life which then led to a coerced secret settlement. But there is more: during those 9 years, my wife had to submit monthly "mitigation" reports documenting her job search to gain employment. The defense lawyer secretly arranged job interviews with German American companies that were doing business with the age discriminator defendant company, hoping that she would refuse the job or could not do it but that also failed. She took all the jobs and after a couple of days or weeks, she was "no longer needed" although there was never anything wrong with her performance. One of the more ridiculous attempts was to accuse her of "atrocious" spelling mistakes but unbeknownst to the lawyer, my wife's computer had a spell-check feature which she always used. Undaunted, the former president of the company falsely testified that her German spelling was less than perfect but unfortunately for the defendants, my wife had written letters in German when she could have written in English and an expert witness testified that her German spelling was perfect even without a German computer spell-check. As W. C. Fields would say, I love lawyers but only after they are properly prepared. And then, of course, there is the useless AARP, which would rather sell 2-page advertising spreads in their glossy Modern Maturity mag than help job ageism victims which they could very easily do by organizing the 30 million AARP members into the most powerful lobby there ever was, to force through an Act Against Job Ageism that would provide judgments in effective deterrent amount. Such a law would be 100% effective because job ageism is a purely economic crime. You cannot replace a $30,000 woman or minority with a $15,000 white male but you can certainly replace a $60,000 managerial, administrative or professional employee with a half as old for half the money. In fact, it's been done millions of times and continuing. If I am elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, I will introduce a bill to provide reparations for victims of age discrimination in employment. The bill will compel discriminators to pay reparations to all their age victims since 1967 or earlier in states with pre-existing age acts. Violations to be established by victim affidavits creating a rebuttable presumption of violation. Once the affidavit is filed establishing guilt, the paries will be known as victim and violator, not plaintiff and defendant. Amounts billed to violators will be based on Social Security records, employer records and other evidence. In all age related litigation, violators will always bear the burden of proof and all costs and fees for all parties. Only victims can compel discovery. Violators already know why they discriminated, plus they have all the money and witnesses. My bill is to be enforced by a new federal Age Victims Agency (U.S. AVA), to be staffed by motivated age victims only, and financed by fines. AVA staff to be paid a percentage of reparations collected from discriminators, in addition to their civil service salary and benefits. Victims' spouses, children, and others affected by discrimination and discovery will have separate additional standing to sue both violators and their law firms and lawyers, especially because in a country where health insurance ends upon employment termination, and where a youth culture prevents almost all age victims from finding new jobs, the devastation caused to victims cannot even be imagined by most people, but dramatized in 1949 by Arthur Miller in Death of a Saslesman.