Men Over 40

Forty is the perilous age for a workingman. After that he is the first to suffer in a layoff, the last to regain employment. Employers are exhibiting an increasing preference for younger men, at the expense of their elders.

Noting these facts, the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, meeting last week in Miami, went to grips with a new labor problem by instructing President William Green to make a survey of the "deadline-at-40" practice among employers. President Green's first line of inquiry will be through the State legislatures.

Labor suspects that it knows what causes underlie the discrimination against 40-year-oldsters. Older men are discharged and younger men hired, thinks Labor, to keep down the average employe age upon which group insurance premiums are reckoned and paid. Unmarried men are in greater demand than family men because of the lower payments to be made under workmen's compensation laws.

Said President Green: "As for group insurance that is always paternalistic and the employer wishes to pay as small a price for his paternalism as possible. . . . If a man who has four children is killed, the insurance carrier will have more to pay than in the case of a single man. In the latter case about all they have to do is to bury him."

Organized demands for greater immigration restriction, and elimination of private, profit-seeking insurance companies from the labor field, were suggested at Miami as protections for workingmen over 40.