Age, Jobs, and Inequalities

Having a job can be a burden and a benefit at once, and so we tend to treat employment as a right and a duty. The distribution of jobs is therefore a pressing matter of social justice, understood as the fair distribution of burdens and benefits of social cooperation. We are well familiar with work inequalities patterned on gender, race, immigration status, level of ability, and social class, among other. But work is also very unequally distributed between persons at different stages of their lives. This chapter applies the normative insights offered in previous chapters to the complex world of work. It seeks to identify which workplace and labor market inequalities in rights and obligations should concern us by looking at programs that enforce a special right to work for the young, a special duty to retire for senior workers, and a special duty to work for the young. The chapter also examines the phenomenon of wrongful age discrimination in employment and the notion of age-integrated workplaces.