Camille Olson Quoted in Inside Counsel

The November issue of Inside Counsel notes [in the article "The EU’s attempt to stamp out ageism creates a jumble of new laws"] that "Because most EU member states had no age discrimination laws, employers could force older workers out by setting mandatory retirement ages and offering early retirement incentives that were too good to pass up. Older workers who were looking for a new job had an even harder time. Employers could explicitly advertise the need for a “young, dynamic workforce” and select applicants based on age. Yet barring the old from the labor force had its consequences. Like in the U.S., EU officials realized that as the workforce shrunk and the number of retirees grew, the social security system would buckle under its own weight. Something had to be done to force employers to hold on to and protect their aging workforce. So in 2000 the European Council passed Directive 2000/78/EC, a wide-sweeping law that creates protections for workers on a number of grounds including age. Each EU member has until Dec. 1 to implement the directive. However, the directive only sets the baseline. Each member state can impose stricter legislation, which is creating a patchwork of age discrimination laws throughout the EU. In addition, the member states are taking different approaches to enforcing the new laws. All of which is leaving companies vulnerable to discrimination claims."

"Although laws will vary from country to country, the directive does establish some uniform policies member states must follow. First, the directive protects workers of all ages. That is much different from U.S. age discrimination law, which only applies to people older than 40. In addition, the EU directive establishes new rules governing employee retirement plans. Prior to the directive, retirement ages throughout Europe were relatively young, due in part to mandatory retirement programs. In fact, the average age of retirement across the EU was 60.4 in 2001, according to the EU’s office of statistics. But now with its social security programs in peril, the EU has upped the age at which employers can force workers out to 65. “Employers in the EU are going to have to decide what to designate as a retirement age for employees or if they are going to set retirement ages at all,” says Camille Olson, a partner in Seyfarth Shaw’s Chicago office. Although the directive sets the threshold for minimum mandatory retirement ages, each member state can implement its own version of the law. That inconsistency is one of the biggest problems the directive creates. Because of these vast differences, experts agree that the country-by-country approach to compliance has the best chance of succeeding. “You have to make a determination as to what sort of differences in policy you will have by country, which will depend on how different each country’s laws are,” Olson says."