OLD MEN ON THE JOB.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 253, 23 February 1917, Page 3 (Supplement)

OLD MEN ON THE JOB.

Chicago employers are testing men of middle age who seek work by advertisement beside younger applicants, to "upset the fallacious theory that men between the ages of fortyfive and sixty-five are only fit for the scrap heap." Business reasons may enforce these humane considerations. One experimenter put twenty mid-dle-aged men wrapping parcels, which they did as well as younger ones. Results at least as favourable should reward a similar text in the correspondence department, -where experience should prove of value. Yet success may not convince all sceptics. The common objection to hiring a man of fifty is not so much that he cannot do a day's work to-morrow as that he may not do it ten years from now. American employers chase the impossible ideal of a business that "runs itself," for which long tenure is desired. No business does run itself. No real business man would be happy if it did. Change Is the law of growth, and disappointments in personnel are as likely to come from young men's yielding to temptations as from old men's becoming slow, garrulous, and forgetful. Where pensions are provided, justice may be served by grading the allowance by years of sen-ice, not age. In other cases there can be no valid objection to the old man on the job.

The great figures In the most strenuous undertaking going on In the world to-day, that of the war, are men averaging well past sixty. In civil life, the proscribing of old workmen, which in no other country has gone such lengths as in America, is a cruel injustice, says the "New York World." It is a vast civic waste. The Chicago experiments m.iy prove that it is also a business blunder.