Making money
A shrinking IBM stands accused in a
lawsuit of firing as many as 100,000
employees, targeting older workers,
said Olivia Carville in Bloomberg.com.
The suit, filed by a 61-year-old from
Texas who worked at the company for
24 years, charges the company system-
atically got rid of older workers over
several years to “boost its appeal to
Millennials.” A former vice president of
human resources backed the claims in a
deposition, saying that IBM is grappling
with “talent recruitment problems” and
determined that one way to show Mil-
lennials it was not “an old fuddy-duddy
organization” was to fire older workers. IBM’s consulting de-
partment told managers that Millennials were “generally much
more innovative and receptive to technology.” The HR exec said
IBM was trying to compete for young workers with Amazon and
Google. Ironically, Google itself just paid out $11 mil lion “to
settle the claims of 227 people who say they were unfairly denied
jobs because of their age,” said Timothy Lee in Ars Technica
.com. In 2013, the median age of Google employees was 29.Isn’t it true that Millennials want flexible work schedules, while
all Baby Boomers don’t know how to text? asked Rice Univer-
sity professor Eden King in the Harvard Business Review. Well,
no. The evidence for generational differences in preferences
and values is actually quite limited. But biases and stereotypesremain. We ran one study asking “un-
dergraduates to train another person
on a computer task using Google’s
chat function.” We varied whether the
trainer or trainee appeared to be old
or young using photographs and voice-
modifying software. “When trainers
believed that they were teaching an
older person how to do the computer
task, they had lower expectations and
provided worse training than when
they believed they were teaching a
young person.” The problem wasn’t
the age or abilities of a worker; it was
the stereotypes held by the trainer.Even after successful age discrimination lawsuits, “the wheels of
justice sometimes turn more slowly than usual,” said Paula Span
in The New York Times. Consider the case of two veteran lan-
guage teachers at Ohio State University. “Both instructors had
felt forced to retire in 2014, years before they had intended,”
after administrators had “made disparaging remarks about age
in emails and office discussions.” Last summer, the university
settled the age discrimination lawsuit, reinstating both teachers
with back pay and benefits. But Ohio State has moved slowly on
other important elements of the settlement, such as a pledge to
amend the university’s process for handling future ageism com-
plaints. Delays and apathy with regard to reform are why “cor-
recting institutional biases can take years.”Ageism: Did Big Blue purge its older workers?
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At job fairs, older workers struggle to compete.No windfall from Equifax
Expecting to score $125 because of the Equi-
fax data breach? Think again, said Elizabeth
Rembert in Bloomberg.com. Last month,
Equifax agreed to a settlement promising up
to $700 million to the 147 million people
whose personal information was exposed in
the 2017 data breach. Initially, the Federal
Trade Commission said simply that claimants
could file for a $125 payout. However, late
last week, the FTC “encouraged affected cus-
tomers to opt for as much as a decade of free
credit monitoring instead.” The settlement in-
cludes $300 million to $425 million for those
who can show identity theft losses. Only
$31 million is available for others, however,
and those who choose to sign on for cash will
get “a very small amount.”But where are customers’ Ferraris?
Not too long ago, the prevailing wisdom was
that “an investment manager’s personal traits
had no bearing on his or her company’s per-
formance,” said Amy Whyte in Institutional
Investor. But now “a recent outpouring of aca-
demic papers” is overturning that conventional
wisdom. One study analyzed videotaped inter-
views with 101 hedge fund managers to spot
traits known as the “dark triad: narcissism,Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.” It found
that those managers who exhibited “dark”
traits underperformed the overall group by
almost a full percentage point each year in an-
nualized returns. Newer studies have pointed
to one other, less ambiguous sign of underper-
formance: driving a Ferrari.Building? Expect unexpected costs
Building a home from the ground up was
one of the best experiences of my life, but I
learned some tough financial lessons along
the way, said Beth DeCarbo in The Wall
Street Journal. Just waiting to break ground
involved several major hurdles, such as “get-
ting the floor plans approved by the develop-
ment’s architectural-review committee, which
meets monthly.” All the paperwork pushed
our start date back six months. By then, we
had sold our old house in New York and
had to rent a home and put our furniture in
storage. “That set us back about $20,000.”
Expenses quickly add up, such as $1,400
“for a required topographical map and tree
inventory.” I also should have “asked more
questions about cost-savings up front”—for
example, whether a different floor plan would
have been less expensive to build on our
steeply sloped lot.What the experts say
The Hudson Link for Higher Education
in Prison (hudsonlink.org) was founded
in 1998, after New York state eliminated
college degree programs in its prisons.
Believing that education is the key to
reducing recidivism rates, the charity
partners with eight colleges to offer
accredited courses and associate and
bachelor’s degrees in five correctional
facilities across the state. The organiza-
tion runs four programs designed to
help inmates at every stage of their
educational pursuits during and after
incarceration, including an intensive
one-year college prep course, and job
search assistance to help them success-
fully transition back into society. Hudson
Link has since awarded more than
700 degrees, and only 2 percent of the
inmates it serves return to prison. Charity of the week
Each charity we feature has earned a
four-star overall rating from Charity
Navigator, which rates not-for-profit
organizations on the strength of their
finances, their governance practices,
and the transparency of their operations.
Four stars is the group’s highest rating.