Age discrimination is illegal, but usually difficult to prove. Proving it could get easier if the company does something as blatant as use Facebook targeting to exclude older workers, which a ProPublica and New York Times joint investigation finds is common:
A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be “more than just a number.”
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation’s capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.
Facebook and at least some of the companies engaging in the practice defend it, though others changed course in the course of the investigation.
The practice has begun to attract legal challenges. On Wednesday, a class-action complaint alleging age discrimination was filed in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of the Communications Workers of America and its members — as well as all Facebook users 40 or older who may have been denied the chance to learn about job openings. The plaintiffs’ lawyers said the complaint was based on ads for dozens of companies that they had discovered on Facebook. [...]
Eric Goldman, professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara University School of Law, who has written extensively about Section 230, says it is hard to predict how courts would treat Facebook’s age-targeting of employment ads.
Goldman said the law covered the content of ads, and that courts have made clear that Facebook would not be liable for an advertisement in which an employer wrote, say, “no one over 55 need apply.” But it is not clear how the courts would treat Facebook’s offering of age-targeted customization.
The courts had better decide, because targeting is a giant part of online advertising.
● #MeToo in the fields: Farmworkers show us how to organize against sexual violence.
● 2017 year in review: Turning lemons into lemonade.
● The Republican blitzkrieg on workers.
● The truth about AT&T's $1,000 bonus for workers.
● JetBlue flight attendants want a union. Sarah Jaffe reports on the effort:
A JetBlue flight attendant involved in the organizing drive, who asked that her name not be used out of fear of retaliation, told me, “I love my job. My job is awesome. I have a great time. We, basically, are a funny set of people who decided that caring for people is what we want to do, but we didn’t want to go into the medical field.” Enjoying the work is important when the job description includes the maintenance of an agreeable countenance. But there are many things, the flight attendant explained, that make that smile hard to produce.
There’s the fact that the delays that so stress customers are also stressful for flight attendants. Not only will they have to deal with angry passengers, but they don’t actually get paid for the time they spend sitting around the airport waiting to board. “The only time we get paid is when the flight door is closed or an extended ground delay with people on the plane for more than 45 minutes,” the attendant said. “When we show up to the gate and the plane isn’t there and we are delayed, we are just as mad as everybody else because we are not actually getting paid for that. That is industry standard.” In practice, this means that attendants can sometimes work unpaid for hours.
● Florida's disposable workers: Companies profit from undocumented laborers, dump them after injuries:
After Abednego de la Cruz sliced his finger to the bone cutting concrete blocks while building a fire station in Tallahassee, his boss fired him and refused continued medical care for his injury.
De la Cruz, a 37-year-old father whose dominant hand remains damaged, thought he could rely on the workers’ compensation system, which requires employers to cover medical care and lost wages for injured employees.
Instead, his employer called the police and had him arrested. The undocumented immigrant now faces almost certain deportation and fears he won’t be able to raise his 1-year-old, U.S.-born daughter.
● Close to 200 Dulles Airport workers to go on strike in busy days leading up to Christmas:
The strike was announced Monday and is part of the contracted service workers' fight for better pay from Huntleigh USA Corporation and the ability to unionize.
Some of the workers say they are only paid $6.50 an hour and that they need to work multiple jobs. This will mark the third year an a row that the workers will ask for $15 an hour.
The employees striking include customer service agents, baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants.
● We don’t know what caused that train derailment, but it’s worth mentioning that the union representing Amtrak workers has been pushing for more training for a while now.