ABSTRACT
Age discrimination, of which retirement is a particular variant, dates from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Between 1885 and 1940, age discrimination went through two major historical stages. Before 1915, age discrimination was born and nurtured at the hands of a capitalist economy that, relative to its twentieth-century counterpart, was very competitive and committed to a high level of productive efficiency in the pursuit of short-term profit. In the two decades after 1915, age discrimination worsened absolutely because of continued technological change, an intensification of the youth cult during the 1920’s, and the unemployment of the Depression. Age discrimination had begun to change with the changing face of American capitalism. Gerhart von Schulze-Gavernitz used the classic case of the English cotton textile industry as evidence that high wages and falling work hours could be reconciled with productivity, through the mechanism of age discrimination.
