The Growing Debate Over Mandatory Retirement
By Elaine Schiff

Hold onto your swivel chair. The folks at HR are looking for some fresh, young talent to take your place. It’s the law of the corporate jungle: Out with the old, in with the new. And, let’s be honest, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper to hire someone who’s still a bit green behind the ears to do your job.

Age and experience triumph
Welcome to the world of mandatory retirement. In the airline industry, for instance, commercial pilots must retire by age 60. That has been a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration mandate since 1959. But while kicking aging pilots out of the cockpit may sound sensible, the facts say otherwise.

Stanford University conducted a study of 118 pilots, ages 40 to 69, measuring their performance in a range of flight-related tasks, from traffic avoidance to communications. Believe it or not, over the three-year period of the study, the older pilots’ test scores on a flight simulator actually improved as compared to the scores of the younger pilots. In effect, according to the Stanford researchers, age and experience can give workers an edge over their colleagues. The findings bolster the argument that age-based restrictions on work (i.e. mandatory retirement) should be abandoned in favor of competency-based criteria.

Fortunately, a great many employers across the country have already embraced that concept. Most universities have no retirement age requirements. Many government agencies place no age limits on their office workers  — although they usually do for safety-related jobs such as police (age 55-60), firefighters (age 55-60) and air traffic controllers (age 56  — if hired after 1972). These, of course, are earlier-than-normal retirement ages compared to most occupations.

Meanwhile, in corporate America mandatory retirement is still common practice. General Motors draws the line at 65. Ford’s mandatory retirement age is 70. Even the tech sector engages in the practice, with chip-maker Intel mandating retirement at age 65, and computer giant Hewlett-Packard setting the ceiling at age 72.

The debate in New York
The retirement debate has recently set the legal community on fire. This year, a special committee of the New York State Bar Association has demanded law firms ban the requirement that partners retire at a pre-determined age, stating that “mandatory retirement — requiring a partner to leave the firm upon reaching an arbitrary age — is not an acceptable practice.”

Bar association officials argued that it is illogical for the legal profession to set increasingly lower mandatory retirement ages while people are living far longer and healthier lives. In more genteel times, law firms would allow older partners to continue working as long as they wished, serving as mentors to younger attorneys. But today, in a legal culture that values income and profits over age and experience, the senior partners are being routinely squeezed out in order to maintain higher incomes for the younger partners. In a 2004 survey of 46 law firms with 100 or more attorneys, 57 percent had mandatory retirement policies. The retirement age ranged from 65 to 72.

Driving the point home, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed an age discrimination lawsuit against Sidley Austin, a Chicago law firm accused of demoting or forcing the retirement of 32 older partners in 1999.

Underscoring the argument that advancing age doesn’t necessarily translate into lost skills is the Stanford pilots study. Scientists who analyzed the results were stunned to see that instead of exhibiting declining skills over the three-year period of the study, the older pilots demonstrated marked improvement. According to neurologist Joseph Sirven, “This is one of those times where age and experience do impart something that gives you extra help to level the playing field. You may not be as fast, but this crystallized intelligence gives an extra advantage. Age gives you wisdom that makes up for the slowing of other skills.”

That line of reasoning has led many to argue that employers shouldn’t judge works based on their actual age, but rather on their “functional age.” Companies may be better off assessing their older workers through a battery of specialized tests before determining that it’s time for them to retire. This approach, according to many experts, could be applied across a wide range of professions, from factory workers to teachers, from lawyers to heart surgeons.

The bottom line? Sixty-five isn’t old anymore. Age and experience are a winning combination for employers.