“This suit puts the PWC culture of ‘youth is good, age is bad’ under a microscope,” McGann said.
The lawsuit claims that the company almost exclusively relies on campus recruiting to fill entry-level accounting positions, focuses almost exclusively on attracting and retaining millennials and has a mandatory early retirement policy that requires partners to retire by age 60.
Forced retirement policies are lightning rods for complaints and litigation. EEOC has recently brought and settled lawsuits involving mandatory retirement policies against Johnson & Higgins for $28.1 million and Sidley and Austin for $27.5 million.
Taking heed of these legal challenges is critical to the youth-starved advisor industry, where a majority of advisors—some 40 percent—are age 55 and older and the average age is 50.1, according to statistics provided by Cerulli analyst Kenton Shirk.
The aging of American workers is not expected to let up in any of our lifetimes. Across America, workers who are 55 and older have more than doubled in the past 25 years, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics BLS). Workers aged 65 to 74 and older are expected to grow by 75 percent by 2050, while those age 25 to 54 will grow by just 2 percent.
“There is financial accountability if you’re not hiring and promoting older workers and it is not difficult for the EEOC or plaintiffs to figure this out,” said David Gabor, a partner with the Wagner Law Group.
“Older workers are very sensitive if they see opportunities taken away from them or they’re being pushed out the door at 60 when they thought they could work until 70. They’ll go to a lawyer and the EEOC. The more employees impacted by age discrimination, the more expensive these complaints and lawsuits can be,” said Gabor who has practiced employment law for more than 20 years.
The best practices for advisor firms who want to avoid age discrimination complaints? Create and leverage the benefits of a multigenerational workforce, attorneys said.
“The tone comes from the top, so it’s important for senior management to buy into the proposition that they have to recognize, understand and reject age-related assumptions and stereotypes and build their policies and practices from there,” Gabor said.
Advertising and recruiting should be done across all generations and mediums. Tools on Facebook and other social media that allow recruiters to microtarget specific age groups are a recipe for legal trouble. It is the basis of a major class-action lawsuit brought by the Communications Workers of America.