In an age of identity politics, it’s hard to believe that ageism still runs rampant. But while more employers are joining the fight against many forms of discrimination, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation, ageism remains an issue in workplaces nationwide.

Changing working conditions, climbing prices, and debate about raising the retirement age are luring older Americans back to work, forcing a reckoning with deep-rooted bias that impacts nearly half of all employees over age 40..

To understand age discrimination and how it’s changed since similar research in 2021, Seniorliving.org surveyed 1,203 Americans about their experiences with ageism in the workplace. Their ages ranged from 40 to 60-plus, and 54 percent of them were women.

The survey concluded that age discrimination is widespread, underreported, and begins earlier than most might expect, according to Seniorliving.org. For instance:

  • 47 percent of workers over 40 have experienced age discrimination or ageism, at companies of all sizes and to males and females.
  • The typical age when age discrimination first begins is about 45.
  • Though federal statistics show age discrimination has decreased over the last decade, nearly a third of discrimination reports go unreported. This is often because victims worry that nothing will be done.
  • 52 percent of older workers said if they were to actively look for new jobs, their age would negatively impact their job searches.

Age-based employment discrimination was outlawed by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967, which applies to private companies with 20 or more employees and all government agencies. Specifically, the law protects workers over age 40 against discrimination in any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, and benefits.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) investigates and enforces the law while recording all reported violations. Since 1997, the EEOC has received nearly 500,000 age discrimination claims. That number is about one-fifth of all employment discrimination claims. However, there has been a downward trend in age discrimination claims in recent years. Federal age discrimination claims fell nearly 9 percent from 2020 to 2021, and are down 45 percent over the past decade.

These numbers only tell part of the story, though. Seniorliving.org’s study revealed 49 percent of people who experienced on-the-job age discrimination reported the occurrence to a manager or to human resources. Additionally, many workers may be unaware of their rights and suffer discrimination without seeking protection. As the ADEA also prohibits harassment based on age, derogatory remarks that create offensive work environments or drive adverse employment decisions are also considered unlawful discrimination.

Forms of age discrimination reported by workers include assumptions about ability to learn new skills (the most-reported form at 19 percent), missed raises or promotions, less-desirable assignments or projects, bias in hiring and recruitment, reduced work hours, ageist harassment, remarks or jokes, and job losses through firing or layoffs.

In cases of businesses pressuring older workers to resign or retire, Chiquita Hall, an employment attorney, said employers “are pushing them out with an overwhelming amount of new changes. This has resulted in more forced resignations, buyouts, and terminations disguised as layoffs.”

States with the highest  number of age-based charges are Nevada, Maine, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Illinois, according to EEOC statistics from 2021.

Source: Seniorliving.org, a research and resources site for economic and social issues affecting older adults.

‘Never too old’ are words to live by

By Barbara Sellers

What motivates senior citizens to get out of bed every morning, keep on going, and actively participate in community activities? Perhaps a retiree who has been residing in the Tacoma area for the last 38 years can answer that question and one more” How old is too old to make a dream come true or start a new career?

At 88, Donald R. Sellers, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, recently published his first book, “Voyages of Discovery.”

“My original intentions were to publish some of my short stories as a legacy for family and friends,” Sellers said. “Since then, I’ve been encouraged to open up distribution and see what happens.”

Besides promoting his new book (now available on Amazon in hardcover, softcover and e-book), Sellers remains active in speaking and writing organizations, too. As a 39-year member in Toastmasters International, he served as president of Club 1123 several times. He also served in area and division upper-leadership positions, started the Chit Chatters club at the Western Washington Women’s prison, and as the 1993 elected District 32 governor, he earned the Distinguished District Award. He’s now mentoring five Toastmaster members, and is president of the Plateau Area Writers Association and the lead for a writing critique group, Writers Helping Writers.

One thing Sellers enjoys most about writing fiction is the act of creation.

“I can sit down for an hour or two and leave this world,” he said. “It’s especially rewarding when I read a story I wrote 15 years ago and find I can still relish the experience. Sometimes I exclaim in surprise, ‘I wrote that? Wow! That’s much better than I anticipated.’”

Reading is another passion Sellers has always had. In fact, when Sellers was a young boy, a neighbor lady paid him to read to her.

“I don’t remember how or where I learned to read,” he said. “But I could read and understand the newspaper when I was in first grade.”

Ever since then, Sellers has been a book-lover and avid reader. In his 20s, he mostly read science-fiction, but today his writing and reading sweeps across many genres, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

“I read in most genres except romance,” he said. “I usually have three or four books open. Currently, I’m reading fantasy, health maintenance, and a memoir by a member of my writer’s association.”

Sellers believes the books he read by great authors helped him develop his writing skills.

“I believe working with writing groups and serving as an editor increases writing skills, too,” he said. “I subscribe to three writing magazines and have 47 self-help writing books in my library.”

It would be difficult to know how many books he has read, but he has read some of his favorites several times. For example, he read “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury nine times, “Fahrenheit 451” by Bradbury four times, “Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck five times, “The Winter of our Discontent” by Steinbeck four times, and many others two or three times.

So far, Sellers has written 16 short stories, nine flash fiction and 16 newspaper commentaries.

He first became interested in writing in his teen years but put it on hold to make a living in the military.

What goal or hope does Sellers have for his reading fans?

“What I hope for is reading-enjoyment and pleasure,” he said. “Some of the stories have surprise endings and some of the stories just recreate specific moments. One of the lessons I’ve learned from my studies is this: If we can’t feel the feelings and emotions of our characters, how can we expect the reader to gain the same expectations? With some of these stories, I break down with emotion and sometimes tears blur my eyes and I can’t read further.”

So how old is too old to make a dream come true or start a new career?

“We’re never too old,” Sellers said. “Each new day is a gift, and as long as we’re still breathing, we should continue to do something to make every day count. I know I will, even if I live to be 100.”

Barbara Sellers is a former newspaper editor and has two published books available through Amazon –“Get Tough or Die: Why I Forgave My Parents for My Abusive Childhood” and “That’s Life in Poetry and Short Stories.”

Hooked on volunteering

On an icy-cold winter morning in Swan Creek Park, Scott Murdock was the first to show up for a trash cleanup. As he stumped over the fresh snow with a garbage bag, he’d already been scouting the park before anyone arrived, informing organizers which areas had the most trash.

After five years of volunteering for Metro Parks Tacoma’s CHIP-In program and the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium’s horticulture team, Murdock has racked up a whopping 4,760 official hours of ripping ivy and blackberry, spreading mulch, and reclaiming land for wildlife in parks around Tacoma.

But to Murdock, it’s just a part of something he’s done ever since he retired: Giving back.

“I was born in Seattle, grew up in Olympia, and apart from three years working in Idaho, I’ve never lived outside Washington,” said Murdock. “Growing up, I did a lot of hiking with the Boy Scouts. I loved it.”

But working-life intervened, as it often does. Murdock’s a civil engineer who spent the bulk of his career inspecting bridges and ferry terminals for the Washington Department of Transportation. When he retired in 2014, he realized he wanted to get back to hiking – and to give back to those mountains, trails, and forests he loved as a boy.

He’d already spent years volunteering for other groups like Wilderness Volunteers and the Washington Trails Association (WTA), even spending weeks at a time doing carpentry projects at Holden Village, a retreat center in the North Cascades. A longtime Northeast Tacoma resident, he helped restore Julia’s Gulch, a lush ravine running down from the upper neighborhood to the water.

He volunteered for CHIP-In at Alderwood Park – and was hooked. “It had a lot of ivy and blackberry,” said Murdock, who lived close by. “So I said I’d like to take care of it, to give back.”

Since then, the tall, laconic engineer with a thick white beard has served nine years as park steward, a volunteer who commits to regular monthly hours at a particular park and helps organize other volunteers. He’s been a regular at Alderwood and Browns Point Playfield, helping other stewards at Franklin, Titlow, Dickman Mill, and Swan Creek Parks. He also volunteers at Point Defiance Zoo, helping the horticulture team keep on top of the extensive botanic gardens there.

“Scott’s years of commitment and passion for assisting with the zoo’s botanical collection have been outstanding,” said zoo horticulturalist Bryon Jones. “The horticultural team looks forward to his weekly visits and his keen eye for detail which he brings to maintaining our grounds and plant collection.”

And his service hasn’t gone unnoticed by others. He won Tacoma’s 2019 City of Destiny Award for environmental sustainability, and another in 2021 as part of the zoo team. But he brushes off those accolades with a quiet humility, focusing more on what’s still to be done.

One recent day, that was English ivy. Starting around 8 a.m. at the natural trails on the northern edge of Browns Point Playfield, he pulled the invasive vine off towering madrona and fir trees, piling it up to break down naturally. As he worked, he pointed out other massive ivy piles and hummocky areas of salal, sword fern, and huckleberry glistening with dew.

“That was all blackberry when I started,” he explained.

Spending up to 20 hours a week working in parks as he does, educating the public is a part of the job. One day, clearing all that blackberry, a local resident complained that he was taking away all the habitat for birds. “I explained to her that what I was doing would let native vegetation grow and thrive, which provides much better food for birds than blackberries,” he said.

Other benefits of clearing invasive plants include the ability of Metro Parks and WTA to create more trails, thus protecting plants from human feet and encouraging walkers to explore. Murdock has also found that bringing back wildlife discourages unwanted human use, like teenage parties or trash. It also helps Metro Parks maintenance crews, lightening their load so they can focus on other areas like playgrounds, spraygrounds, playfields and restrooms.

For Murdock, the benefits of volunteering are intensely personal.

“It keeps me busy,” he said. “It’s my exercise program. It’s a great feeling to give back, and I can look around and see what I’ve accomplished. I feel really connected to the neighborhood.” With a smile, he added that “if it’s raining heavily, I might not go out. I’m getting lazy.”

Information about joining work parties or volunteering with Metro Parks Tacoma is available at metroparkstacoma.org/chip-in.

 

At Browns Point Playfield, one of the Metropolitan Parks Tacoma locales that benefit from his volunteer work.

 

Better Internet coming to rural communities

Internet access has become a prerequisite for participating in modern life. Examples: Getting medical care, filing taxes, or paying rent can all require logging on. But the connectivity to make that happen isn’t equal for all. High-speed broadband access that’s taken for granted by city-dwellers often is out of reach in rural places.

To change that, the federal government has made tens of billions of dollars available nationally for telecom companies and local governments to help close the gaps. The Key Peninsula area in Pierce County received some good news in January when county officials and Comcast finalized an agreement to expand the availability of high-speed Internet for more than 526 homes and businesses.

Comcast will build the infrastructure for multi-gig broadband speed for residents and business customers. The approximately $5 million project is being funded as a public-private partnership between Comcast and the county, with $3.75 million of the funding funneled through the county in the form of federal money from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

“Now more than ever, it’s crucial that people have access to high-speed Internet” for work, school and entertainment, said County Executive Bruce Dammeier.

Nationwide, the number of homes with no or slow Internet access isn’t clear, but Microsoft estimates as many as 120 million people — roughly one-third of the U.S. population – are behind the curve.

Key Peninsula is one of the places that’s catching up. Roy Novosel, a regional vice president of Comcast, said the upgrades on the way there are “an extension of our commitment to investing in and expanding our network to ensure that more residents and businesses have the important broadband connections they need.”

Once permits are obtained and construction has begun in public rights-of-way, Comcast will start giving peninsula-area residents information about the network buildup in their neighborhoods, including product and service details.

Meanwhile, broadband advocates see a rare chance to reshape the highly consolidated online landscape, thanks to a $42 billion program tucked into President Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Law. Unlike previous federal subsidies, the most ambitious single deployment of federal resources to date will flow through state governments, which can prioritize open-access networks.

Even amid growing acknowledgement of the Internet as an essential utility, some advocates remain skeptical of whether passing money through states will overcome decades of fragmented policy and keep rural locales from slipping through the digital cracks.

Public utility districts (PUDs) emerged in Washington in the 1930s, when rural areas were grappling with how to provide electricity. At that time, rural communities lacked the legal authority to form public utilities, and it took a statewide ballot measure, passed in 1930, to pave the way for public electrical systems.

Internet service has followed a similar trajectory. Until a repeal in 2021, Washington was one of 20 states that banned or restricted public entities from providing Internet service. Most of those laws are still on the books, posing obstacles to federal efforts to expand access.

Amid the influx of federal stimulus dollars, many of Washington’s PUDs are jockeying for state infrastructure grants. In one such case in the state’s southwest area near Elma, a state board rejected a grant application due to an objection from Comcast, which argued it already served about a quarter of the homes in the proposed area. It was one of eight public broadband expansion plans scuttled by objections from private telecom companies, including Comcast and Nevada-based Rural Wireless LLC, in a process that state regulators have vowed to reform.

Washington has earmarked more than $400 million for broadband infrastructure grants, most of it federal aid from the American Rescue Plan. The most recent round of applications closed Jan. 17.

If past federal efforts to expand broadband access were plagued by a lack of oversight or accountability, local leaders in Washington hope this time will be different. State officials expect to pull in at least $900 million from the federal infrastructure bill this summer.

In Washington, only public and non-profit entities — ranging from PUDs and ports to cities and tribes — can apply for funding. But many are expected to form partnerships with private companies to serve customers.

One county is experimenting with a different, fully public model. Taking advantage of the 2021 law change, Jefferson County’s PUD is getting into the retail telecom business to offer service directly to consumers. The PUD won a $24 million grant last year to build fiber lines to 2,600 homes on the Olympic Peninsula.

 

Sources: Crosscut, a non-profit Pacific Northwest news site and part of Cascade Public Media, contributed to this report.

The Purdy Bridge is known as the gateway to Key Peninsula, one of the rural locales targeted for high-speed Internet through local and federal efforts.