White House Conf. has no time for ravages of recession, discrimination

The once-every-decade White House Conference on Aging (WHCOA) sent out an email blast Saturday revealing the agenda for its signature event today.

Apparently there was no time in the jam-packed schedule to address the financial havoc wrought upon older Americans by the worst recession  in 100 years or the epidemic of age discrimination in hiring that relegates older workers to chronic unemployment, low-paid work, and a financially improvident “early retirement.” The conference will focus on care-giving, “planning for financial security at every age,” nutrition, “the power of inter-generational connections and healthy aging,” universal design, and technology and the future of aging.

Can it be the youthful organizers of the WHCOA are unaware that the Great Recession cost millions of Americans who are now approaching or entering their retirement years their jobs, homes and investments?

A recent AARP survey found that half of older workers who experienced unemployment in the last five years are still not working: 38 percent reported they were unemployed and 12 percent had dropped out of the labor force. To make matters worse, private sector employers in the past two decades eliminated traditional defined benefit pensions.  Recent generations financed their retirement with a combination of savings, a traditional defined benefit pension, and Social Security.  Two legs of that stool are gone for millions of American workers and Social Security is under attack from the right.

The Economic Security Institute reported in 2013 that nearly half (48 percent) of America’s 41 million seniors are “economically vulnerable,” including 63.3 percent of blacks and 70.1 percent of Hispanics. To be economically vulnerable is to have an income that is less than two times the supplemental poverty threshold (a poverty line more comprehensive than the traditional federal poverty line).

Incredibly, the WHCOA issued briefs on “retirement security” and “elder justice” that do not even mention the recession and age discrimination in employment.

The dismissive treatment of age discrimination in employment by the WHCOA is emblematic of the second-class treatment of older Americans generally by the Obama administration and the U.S. Congress.  The WHCOA held in prior years was funded by the Congress under the Older Americans Act Amendments of 1992. According to the WHCOA, Congress did not reauthorize the Older Americans Act nor provide funding for this year’s conference but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services decided to go ahead with the conference anyway.

At some point, the WHCOA decided to partner with the AARP, which has a for-profit arm that sells access to the 37-million  membership base of the AARP’s non-profit arm.  It appears that the AARP had a dominate role in the conference. On its website, the AARP says it co-sponsored and co-planned the WHCOA’s five regional forums with a lobbying group called Leadership Council of Aging (LCAO), a coalition of 72 of the nation’s leading organizations serving older Americans. A spokesperson for the LCAO said the AARP is leading the LCAO this year. It is anyone’s guess whether the AARP’s understandable enthusiasm for marketing its $3.4 billion brand influenced the focus of the conference – healthy aging.

Of course, older Americans are concerned about healthy aging but they’re also concerned about how they’re going to pay for it when they’re 80.

There is a stark contrast between this year’s WHCOA and prior WHCOAs. More  than a thousand delegates from every state were invited to Washington, DC, for the 2005 conference to discuss the concerns and hopes of older Americans. There are no delegates this year. Just a bunch of federal bureaucrats with a positive message about aging. Oh yeah, they are asking Americans to answer the following question: “Getting older is better because … .”  In addition to delegates, Congress and the President  in 2005 appointed a 17-member bipartisan policy committee to oversee the event.

The 2015 WHCOA released its agenda a mere three days before the big event but  prior  conferences  published their agenda in the Federal Register and invited public comment. The final report of the WHCOA of 1995 states it featured 600 activities, events and programs held around the country, and more than 300 reports containing policy recommendations generated from the events. Its main goal was to “provide resolutions to influence national aging policy and to develop a blueprint for action to have these resolutions implemented.” With today’s main event, the 2015 WHCOA  will have featured a half-dozen activities and a website.

No One Got the Memo

Sadly, President Obama has been a major disappointment with respect to age discrimination in employment. He promised during his election campaign to strengthen the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 but he never got around to it.

 President Obama may be the first president to go out of his way to actually discriminate on the basis of age.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed an executive order creating the Pathways “Recent Graduates” program, which allows the government to bypass older workers and hire “recent graduates.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of Program Management has “reinvigorated” the Pathways Presidential Management Fellows Program “for people who obtained an advanced degree (e.g., graduate or professional degree) within the preceding two years.” Everyone knows the vast majority of  recent graduates are under the age of 40, even the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). A senior EEOC official recently threatened to go after Silicon Valley companies that post discriminatory job advertisements for “digital natives.” Apparently, Obama, the OPM, Congress and the WHCOA didn’t get the memo.

The first WHCOA was  held in 1961, with subsequent conferences in 1971, 1981, 1995 and 2005.