Latest news with #ageDiscrimination
Daily Mail
09-07-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Jewellery worker, 60, sues for age discrimination claiming his boss called him an 'old git' at work
A jewellery shop worker has sued his boss for age discrimination, claiming he called him an 'old git' at work. Ashok Ahir, 60, who began working for F Hinds as an internal audit assistant in September 2022, told an employment tribunal the comment was made by retail director Jeremy Hinds. He was receiving 'on the job training' for his new role and would travel to branches of the large chain and carry out stock takes with others. Mr Ahir alleged he and Mr Hinds were having dinner with two others in March 2023 whilst carrying out a series of stock takes in Shropshire when they began discussing cars. After he discussed his ex-girlfriend owning a convertible Mazda MX5, Mr Hinds, in his thirties at the time, replied: 'Ash, you old git'. The audit assistant told the tribunal, held in Watford, he was 'shocked, offended, and humiliated' by the 'belittling' comment. He added that he did not feel he could speak up about the alleged incident at the time because Mr Hinds was a director and he feared putting his job' in 'jeopardy'. Mr Ahir also claimed another colleague at the high street jewellery chain F Hinds once told him 'you're old, you're old, you're old' after doing a stock take together. However, the tribunal found Mr Ahir couldn't prove the remarks had been made and dismissed his claims entirely. Mr Hinds denied making a comment like that at any time and said Mr Ahir had not raised it during an internal grievance process. Mr Ahir's line manager also told the hearing that the incident had not been reported to him, despite the assistant auditor claiming he had raised it. Having heard both sides of the allegation, Judge Monica Daley found she 'could not be satisfied' that the remark had been made and dismissed Mr Ahir's claim. She said: 'The tribunal carefully considered the evidence as set out in Jeremy Hinds' notes; it noted that there was no record of this having been reported at the time. 'The remark was not included in the original grievance, and [Mr Ahir's line manager] denies that the remark had been reported to him. 'Having considered all the evidence, the tribunal could not be satisfied that the remark had been made on a balance of probabilities. 'The tribunal found that claimant failed to establish facts from which, in the absence of any other explanation, point to a contravention of the Equality Act having occurred. 'Accordingly, the claim for direct discrimination fails.' Mr Ahir also told the tribunal that concerns about his performance were part of a 'pattern of harassment' because of his age. In July 2023, managing director Paul Hinds, Mr Hinds' brother, said he was 'quite worried' about Mr Ahir's performance having observed him on a stock take. Paul Hinds added he should have been operating at a 'much higher level' given he had been in the role for nearly a year. Mr Ahir tried to tell the tribunal these concerns were influenced by him raising the allegation about Mr Hinds calling him an 'old git'. However, there was 'no evidence' anyone other than him knew about the supposed remark and therefore it could not have impacted Mr Hinds' view. The main concerns about Mr Ahir's performance were that others could not rely on him for 'relatively simple tasks' and he 'lacked understanding' of what the role entailed. The tribunal found that the performance worries came from 'genuine concern' and had no link to Mr Ahir's age. In September 2023, Mr Ahir claimed a similar incident to the 'old git' one took place when a colleague kept saying 'you're old, you're old' on the way back from a stock take. However, Judge Daley once again found there was not enough evidence for Mr Ahir to prove that this comment was made. Finally, Mr Ahir claimed as a result of his grievance, F Hinds gave him an ultimatum of either ending his employment or demoting him. However, the tribunal concluded the offer was made because of the 'genuine concerns' over his performance which meant he could not stay in his current role. Instead of taking either option, Mr Ahir went on sick leave before resigning in May 2024.
The Guardian
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
‘Punishing workers for getting old': how South Korea's wage system impoverishes the elderly
G Young Soo started working at an insurance company at 23 and spent more than three decades climbing the ranks to become branch director. Now, approaching his 60th birthday, Young Soo's employer has systematically stripped away his salary. As part of South Korea's 'peak wage' system, Young Soo's wages were cut by 20% when he turned 56, and by a further 10% each year after that. By the time he is forced to retire next year, he will earn just 52% of what he made at 55, despite the same workload and hours. 'It is not justified,' he said, calling the practice age-based 'discrimination'. For D Young Sook, 59, a nurse facing mandatory retirement after 36 years, the prospect fills her with anxiety. 'I can't imagine myself being out of this organisation,' she said. 'It would feel like standing by myself on a windy road.' Young Soo and Young Sook (not their real names) are among dozens of workers interviewed for a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report published on Wednesday, which reveals how employment policies are used in South Korea to push older workers into lower-paid, more precarious work. The study found that South Korea's employment laws force millions to retire at 60, slashing their salaries by up to half in preceding years through a 'peak wage' system. While companies can choose whether to set a retirement age, 95% of firms with more than 300 employees do, according to the labour ministry, typically choosing the age of 60, affecting 3.1 million workers. Smaller companies are less likely to set retirement ages due to labour shortages. The peak wage system was designed to use the savings from cutting older workers' pay to hire younger employees in a bid to boost productivity. Instead, the policies have contributed to one of the highest elderly poverty rates among developed nations, with 38% of over 65s living below the poverty line. Workers over 60 earn 29% less on average than younger colleagues, with nearly 70% in insecure employment. Bridget Sleap, the report's author, said these measures were designed to protect workers but instead do the opposite. 'They deny older workers the opportunity to continue working in their main jobs, pay them less, and push them into lower-paid, precarious work, all just because of their age. 'The government should stop punishing workers for getting older.' The findings come as South Korea grapples with growing pressure to increase the retirement age, creating a heated societal debate. The country faces the world's lowest birthrate alongside a rapidly ageing population, creating mounting economic pressures. The national pension fund, one of the world's largest, faces potential depletion within decades without major reform. President Lee Jae Myung pledged during his electoral campaign to gradually raise the mandatory retirement age to 65, closing the five-year gap before pension eligibility. The proposal has gained institutional backing, with a government advisory panel and the human rights commission also recommending the change. But the initiative has triggered fierce resistance from younger workers who fear it will limit their job prospects and lower productivity. Research suggests the concern is misplaced with studies in South Korea showing that ageing is not associated with lower work productivity. But simply raising the retirement age could worsen discrimination, legal experts warn. Labour lawyer Kim Ki-duk argues the proposed reform misses the point. 'The retirement system itself is problematic,' Kim told the Guardian. 'Simply raising the retirement age to 65 would give companies more years to apply discriminatory wage cuts under the current system.' Rather than extending mandatory retirement, Kim argues the entire system should be scrapped. His position puts him at odds with major labour unions, who have been pushing for age extensions rather than abolishing mandatory retirement altogether. 'Workers should be able to continue as long as they can perform their duties,' he said. Mandatory retirement at any age violates international human rights law and should be eliminated entirely, says HRW. Under international treaties that South Korea has signed, any employment decisions based on agemust be justified as necessary and proportionate. Reflecting on his colleagues who opted for early retirement rather than endure wage cuts, G Young Soo said it took grit to push against the grain. 'We needed a lot of courage to choose to work until the age of 60.'
Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Worker ‘labelled old git by boss' sues for age discrimination
A 60-year-old auditor who claimed his boss called him an 'old git' at work has sued for age discrimination. Ashok Ahir claimed that his age led his colleagues at a high street jewellery company to doubt his ability to carry out his job, which included physically counting the jewellery items in the company's inventory. Mr Ahir alleged that Jeremy Hinds, retail director and part of the family who began the business, called him an 'old git' while the pair were having dinner after work. The assistant then resigned the following year after being offered either a month's notice or a demotion because of his inability to do 'relatively simple tasks', the panel heard. Dismissed claims The tribunal found that he could not prove the remarks had been made and dismissed his claims of direct discrimination entirely. The hearing, held in Watford, was told that Mr Ahir began working for F Hinds jewellery company as an internal audit assistant in September 2022. He turned 60 in 2023 and was receiving 'on-the-job training' for his new role. In March 2023, Mr Ahir claimed that after mentioning his ex-girlfriend owned a convertible Mazda, Mr Hinds, in his thirties at the time, said 'Ash you old git' while the pair were having dinner. 'Belittling' comment The assistant auditor told the tribunal he was 'shocked, offended, and humiliated' by the 'belittling' comment. He added that he did not feel he could speak up about the alleged incident at the time because Mr Hinds was a director and he feared putting his job 'in jeopardy'. At the tribunal, Mr Hinds denied commenting and said Mr Ahir had not raised it during an internal grievance process. The line manager also told the hearing that the incident had not been reported to him, despite the assistant auditor claiming he had raised it. In September 2023, Mr Ahir claimed a similar incident took place when a colleague kept telling him he was 'old' on the way back from a job. 'Genuine concern' However, Judge Daley once again found that there was not enough evidence for Mr Ahir to prove that this comment was made. The tribunal found that the company's performance worries came from 'genuine concern' and had no link to Mr Ahir's age. Judge Monica Daley found she could not be satisfied that the remark had been made and dismissed Mr Ahir's claim. She said: 'The Tribunal carefully considered the evidence as set out in Jeremy Hinds' notes; it noted that there was no record of this having been reported at the time. 'The remark was not included in the original grievance, and [Mr Ahir's line manager] denies that the remark had been reported to him. 'Having considered all the evidence, the Tribunal could not be satisfied that the remark had been made on a balance of probabilities.'
The Guardian
29-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?
Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn't let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination. Her case was thrown out, but it wasn't the first time the voting age was challenged and it won't be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children's author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it. Both Wall and Beauvais report that a common first reaction to the concept of ageless voting is laughter. Then people start to think, and often they end up saying that they can't find any serious objections. Wall first confronted the question 20 years ago, when he took on a PhD student who had been researching children's parliaments in India. He soon came round to the idea that it was unjust that up to a third of the population was excluded from the democratic process, since political decisions affected them, too. As he became better informed, he realised that excluding the young was bad for society as a whole. Beauvais agrees. In her tract she highlights evidence that larger electorates produce better decisions. Younger people's gaze is fixed further in the future than that of older people, for obvious reasons, but older people have more experience, so they complement each other when it comes to prioritising societal issues. And children are observant and can ask questions that are troubling because they are so fundamental: questions about war, meat, money, love and death, for instance. When Greta Thunberg started campaigning for urgent climate action at the age of 15, Beauvais writes, many adults criticised her, but her position is now mainstream. Children can also be silly and naive, of course. But if silliness and naivety were reasons to deprive people of the vote, many adults would come a cropper. In fact, although the human brain takes years to mature, it hasn't completed that process by 16, 18, or even – for some parts of the brain – the early 30s. And however you define competence to vote, you'll find that it doesn't start or stop cleanly at any age. This line of thought led Wall to conclude that the only criterion for eligibility to vote should be wanting to vote. Again, Beauvais agrees. But they disagree on the practical implications of this. Wall assumes that wanting to vote is the default and proposes that someone else should vote for the young person by proxy until they are able to do so themselves – as already happens for certain categories of adult in many countries, including the cognitively impaired. Most often, the proxy voter in the case of a very young person would be a parent. Beauvais considers proxies risky – what if a five-year-old changed her mind and her parents refused? – and also difficult to implement, for example in the case of divorced parents. She would rather societies accepted that, though a person would have the right to vote from birth, it would be some time before they exercised it. In that time – the length of which would depend on the individual – the right would be purely symbolic. It would still mean something, just as it means something that everyone in the UK has the right to marry a person of the same sex even if many of them will never exercise it. Acommon objection to ageless voting is that individuals who can't be trusted to drink, drive or have sex shouldn't be trusted to vote. But Harry Pearse, research director at the Centre for Deliberation, part of the UK's National Centre for Social Research in London, says that's a red herring. We don't allow the very young to indulge in those behaviours because we want to protect them from the potentially harmful consequences, but voting isn't harmful to the voter. It's not as if we're asking babies to make policy. They may vote badly, whatever that means, but again, so do many adults. Some countries, including Scotland, already allow 16-year-olds to vote, so data exists on 16-year-olds' voting habits. Five-year-olds are an unknown quantity, on the other hand, and Pearse thinks that's a good thing: 'Some healthy chaos gets chucked into the system.' For him, the beauty of democracy – for all its flaws – is its simplicity. When the rule is one-person-one-vote, politicians feel pressure to serve all constituencies. In practice, Beauvais says, because we know so little about how the very young would vote, the voting age would probably have to be lowered incrementally. That way society could address any vulnerabilities the new regime exposed – the risk of a charismatic teacher capturing large numbers of young votes for a given political cause, say – before advancing to the next stage. The goal would still be to abolish the age threshold completely. Many people feel that modern democracies have become calcified. In the past, when that happened, societies sought to expand the franchise, and in time, Pearse says, the expansion reinvigorated democratic life. At this point in history, the only way we can expand, short of violating the species barrier, is downwards in age. Beauvais sees that as much more than a political project. It invites us to stop thinking about participation in terms of competence or productivity, she says, and to focus more on our lived experience and interdependence. It's about what it means to be an individual in society. In her view, we should all want Alisa Perales to vote – and not just for her sake. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Suffrage for Children by Mike Weimann (Common Threads, £18) A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado (Crown Forum, £24) Give Children the Vote by John Wall, (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
The Guardian
29-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The big idea: should we give babies the right to vote?
Two years ago, Alisa Perales sued California and the US government because they wouldn't let her vote. The academically gifted Perales, who was eight years old at the time, argued that the rule excluding under-18s from democracy, which is enshrined in the US constitution, amounted to age discrimination. Her case was thrown out, but it wasn't the first time the voting age was challenged and it won't be the last. The issue of whether the limit should be removed entirely has been raised periodically since at least the 19th century, and the ageless voting movement has been gaining momentum since political philosopher John Wall wrote a manifesto for it in 2021. More recently, children's author and education researcher Clémentine Beauvais published a short tract in her native France making the case for it. Both Wall and Beauvais report that a common first reaction to the concept of ageless voting is laughter. Then people start to think, and often they end up saying that they can't find any serious objections. Wall first confronted the question 20 years ago, when he took on a PhD student who had been researching children's parliaments in India. He soon came round to the idea that it was unjust that up to a third of the population was excluded from the democratic process, since political decisions affected them, too. As he became better informed, he realised that excluding the young was bad for society as a whole. Beauvais agrees. In her tract she highlights evidence that larger electorates produce better decisions. Younger people's gaze is fixed further in the future than that of older people, for obvious reasons, but older people have more experience, so they complement each other when it comes to prioritising societal issues. And children are observant and can ask questions that are troubling because they are so fundamental: questions about war, meat, money, love and death, for instance. When Greta Thunberg started campaigning for urgent climate action at the age of 15, Beauvais writes, many adults criticised her, but her position is now mainstream. Children can also be silly and naive, of course. But if silliness and naivety were reasons to deprive people of the vote, many adults would come a cropper. In fact, although the human brain takes years to mature, it hasn't completed that process by 16, 18, or even – for some parts of the brain – the early 30s. And however you define competence to vote, you'll find that it doesn't start or stop cleanly at any age. This line of thought led Wall to conclude that the only criterion for eligibility to vote should be wanting to vote. Again, Beauvais agrees. But they disagree on the practical implications of this. Wall assumes that wanting to vote is the default and proposes that someone else should vote for the young person by proxy until they are able to do so themselves – as already happens for certain categories of adult in many countries, including the cognitively impaired. Most often, the proxy voter in the case of a very young person would be a parent. Beauvais considers proxies risky – what if a five-year-old changed her mind and her parents refused? – and also difficult to implement, for example in the case of divorced parents. She would rather societies accepted that, though a person would have the right to vote from birth, it would be some time before they exercised it. In that time – the length of which would depend on the individual – the right would be purely symbolic. It would still mean something, just as it means something that everyone in the UK has the right to marry a person of the same sex even if many of them will never exercise it. Acommon objection to ageless voting is that individuals who can't be trusted to drink, drive or have sex shouldn't be trusted to vote. But Harry Pearse, research director at the Centre for Deliberation, part of the UK's National Centre for Social Research in London, says that's a red herring. We don't allow the very young to indulge in those behaviours because we want to protect them from the potentially harmful consequences, but voting isn't harmful to the voter. It's not as if we're asking babies to make policy. They may vote badly, whatever that means, but again, so do many adults. Some countries, including Scotland, already allow 16-year-olds to vote, so data exists on 16-year-olds' voting habits. Five-year-olds are an unknown quantity, on the other hand, and Pearse thinks that's a good thing: 'Some healthy chaos gets chucked into the system.' For him, the beauty of democracy – for all its flaws – is its simplicity. When the rule is one-person-one-vote, politicians feel pressure to serve all constituencies. In practice, Beauvais says, because we know so little about how the very young would vote, the voting age would probably have to be lowered incrementally. That way society could address any vulnerabilities the new regime exposed – the risk of a charismatic teacher capturing large numbers of young votes for a given political cause, say – before advancing to the next stage. The goal would still be to abolish the age threshold completely. Many people feel that modern democracies have become calcified. In the past, when that happened, societies sought to expand the franchise, and in time, Pearse says, the expansion reinvigorated democratic life. At this point in history, the only way we can expand, short of violating the species barrier, is downwards in age. Beauvais sees that as much more than a political project. It invites us to stop thinking about participation in terms of competence or productivity, she says, and to focus more on our lived experience and interdependence. It's about what it means to be an individual in society. In her view, we should all want Alisa Perales to vote – and not just for her sake. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Suffrage for Children by Mike Weimann (Common Threads, £18) A Minor Revolution by Adam Benforado (Crown Forum, £24) Give Children the Vote by John Wall, (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
