If you are someone with a few decades of work experience, you should be an asset to your workplace. Unfortunately, there are times when employees treat older workers with contempt. This may happen in the form of harassing comments or similar behavior. These kinds of behaviors constitute age discrimination and should never happen.
You may not recognize hurtful comments about your age as illegal under the law. The Motley Fool describes some forms of harassing behavior that, if you should experience them, could form the grounds for an age discrimination suit.
Comments about technology
Workers may mistreat you by making comments that imply or outright state that you don’t understand current technology. For example, a worker may say, “Have you heard about this thing called texting? Everyone does it now.” Remarks of this nature denigrate older workers as out of touch with current society.
Insulting nicknames
Good-natured joking is one thing. Giving someone a disparaging nickname is another. Sometimes younger workers give their older counterparts a nickname pointing attention to their age, like a reference to a year decades in the past or to something archaic or obsolete. If you feel the nickname is insulting, you should not have to tolerate it.
Excluding you from conversations
You may also endure harassment because your fellow workers will not let you chime in on conversations on today’s events and culture. A group of employees may discuss a recent TV series that is showing on a streaming service, but they won’t allow you to join the conversation. They may even imply that you don’t understand what streaming is all about.
Such harassment may be ignorant in nature, but the workers behind it may also want to get you to quit your job since firing you may be illegal. Regardless of the reason, no one should tolerate denigrating behavior, and you may have legal options if your workplace refuses to take action.
