If you run your own company or are part of the management at a startup, consider this: Would you like to avoid hiring all twentysomethings?
Not trust anyone over the age of 30 when it comes to taking on new applicants? Well, according to Illinois' anti-age discrimination policies, there's a bizarre blind spot that chicagoemploymentattorneysblog.com discovered: "The federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) and the Illinois Human Rights Act only protect individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. So employees in their twenties and thirties are usually out of luck."
Why is this? Well, because when we think of anti-age discrimination we tend to think or protecting the O.W.L.s -- Older Wiser Learners -- and not the owlets. And apparently "we" also includes the lawmakers, because this means, again, as Andrew Lu's post on chicagoemploymentattorneysblog.com points out this basically makes it legal for "employers [to] discriminate against younger employers."
There's another weird wrinkle, too. If your company has fewer than 15 employees, you can discriminate against whomever you'd like when it comes to age. Weird. Read more about this all here.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer and a lifelong Chicagoan. In addition to currently serving as an interviewer-writer for Adult Swim, he's also a columnist for EGM. He was the Chicago city editor for The Onion A.V. Club where he provided in-depth daily coverage of this city's bustling arts/entertainment scene for half a decade. When not playing video games for work he's thinking of dashing out to Chicago Diner, Pizano's, or Yummy Yummy. His first career aspirations were to be a game-show host.
