In November 2020, the New York City Council passed five new laws against workplace discrimination on the basis of age. These laws have expanded what were already the strongest protections for older workers in the nation. Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging played a key role in this work, which began in 2019 with a collaboration between Brookdale, LiveOn NY, AARP, and Bobbie Sackman, a longtime advocate for older adults. As a group we formulated a set of principles that defined the legislative, policy, and societal changes that facilitate discrimination on the basis of age. We then worked with City Council members Margaret Chin and Diana Ayala to design bills that would address several of these principles.
One of the bills creates a Center for Older Workforce Development (1694-A) dedicated to advocating for older workers and marshaling workforce development resources. A second bill, 1693-A, requires the NYC Department for the Aging to offer ongoing guidance and support to the Center for Older Workforce Development. A third, 1695-A, directs the NYC Commission on Human Rights to monitor age discrimination in the workplace and issue periodic reports to the City Council. The fourth, 1684-A, requires the Commission on Human Rights to create a poster that alerts workers and employers about the rights and protections afforded to older workers by law and requires city agencies to display the poster. The last, 1685-A, requires city agencies to provide age discrimination training to their employees every two years.
Brookdale also brought this ongoing advocacy work into the classroom at Hunter College. Brookdale’s director of strategic policy initiatives, christian gonzález-rivera, worked with five students from Hunter College’s prestigious Eva Kastan Grove Fellowship to develop a landscape analysis of the nation’s age discrimination laws and develop a set of recommendations for strengthening New York City’s own protections.
