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Many employers, and even some employees, argue that workers should be required to retire at an age set by their employer. The reasoning for this argument is once again founded in the common stereotype of older workers as slow and unproductive, asserting that it should reasonable for companies to cap employment for performance reasons.
For example, Professor Saul Levmore at Chicago Law School, who is interestingly an older employee himself (64 at the time of writing), argues that employers should legally be able to set age limits for regular employees in their contracts, known as mandatory retirement. Although allowed in some federal jobs, as well as for CEOs and board members, mandatory retirement ages are currently prohibited for almost all employees under the ADEA (Age Discrimination in Employment Act). Yet, Levmore asserts that "employees should be able to contract as they like, even if this means that some workers will be required to retire at a specified age," backing up this claim by saying he will no longer "be as good at [his] job at 75 as [he] was at 55, and yet [his] employer might be stuck with [him]" (Levmore). He further states that mandatory retirement would prevent employees from staying on the job "past their most productive years" (Levmore). Levmore thus argues that employers should be able to remove older employees at a certain age since they will no longer be as productive for the business.
Levmore logically asserts that employers should be able to get rid of unproductive employees that are no longer good at their job; if an employee cannot work well at a company, there is a justified reason for that employer to replace them with someone who can properly meet the demands of the job. However, like many employers who already fire older employees, Levmore bases his argument off of the misconception that youth is equivalent to productivity, and that all workers over a certain age become "less useful" to their employers (Levmore). In actuality, older employees are often highly rated in performance by their employers, and a study of over 5,000 employees in 2022 even found that the majority felt their workers over age 45 were just as, and even more, productive than their younger coworkers (Tileva); therefore, the fact that they still try to remove older workers highlights how these firings and the desire for mandatory retirement are only rooted in stereotypes, not actual performance. Thus, Levmore is really only grounding his argument in an assumption, which he attempts to make convincible through a hasty generalization about his own possible decline in productivity. Mandatory retirement acts as though age is a measure of workplace performance, unfairly removing older workers due to this number, not actual performance.