FTC Launches Hiring Program That Discriminates Against Older Applicants

The U.S. government, the nation's largest employer, routinely engages in blatant age discrimination in hiring but, alas, nobody seems to care and so the problem just keeps getting worse.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this month launched an “Honors Attorney Program” to hire recent law school graduates for full-time jobs.

Ironically, the FTC announcement occurred around the time the FTC also announced it was collaborating with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to “protect workers by promoting competitive U.S. labor markets and putting an end to unfair, deceptive, and other unlawful acts and practices, as well as unfair methods of competition, that harm workers.”

The NLRB, which supposedly champions the rights of labor, also offers an Honors Program.

So both the FTC and the NLRB are claiming to promote a competitive U.S. labor market and put an end to unfair competition that harms workers while engaging in obvious age discrimination that harms older workers.

Neither the FTC, a bipartisan independent agency that supposedly promotes fair competition, nor the NLRB returned requests for comment.

The “honors” scam is a time-tested formula used by the U.S. government, the nation’s largest employer, to circumvent the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which prohibits hiring based on age.

Casting aside the frilly language, the federal agency essentially hires recent law school graduates as full-time employees. If they successfully pass a two-year probationary period, they are then declared to be officially “hired” and subsumed into the agency’s regular workforce.

How is this discriminatory?