At the root of the BIDC issue is the more fundamental issue of age discrimination and indeed the larger issue of discrimination and the extent to which some forms are considered acceptable in Barbados. The term discrimination is an old one, but has more recently entered the lexicon of public discourse here and across the region. It is therefore not well understood and the most striking misconception is the widely held belief that discrimination is rare and always unacceptable. Instead, discrimination in its many incarnations is both prevalent and popular and moreover is practised by governments and private citizens with justification.
This controversial assertion is easily supported by reference to the type of discrimination that governments across the world practise in the interest of social justice. Reference here is made to “progressive taxation” policies which unashamedly penalise persons who work for more money by forcing them to pay higher levels of tax. The socialist creed “from each according to his [or her] own ability and to each according to his [or her] own need” adequately justifies this economic discrimination.
Age discrimination is less well understood and has not benefited from extensive research or discussion in Barbados. Notwithstanding, it is clear that we have practised age discrimination here and moreover the concept is acceptable to a relatively high proportion of Barbadians. If one takes as a starting point our “mandatory retirement” age, it becomes clear that this approach is to some extent discriminatory since it forces a worker to stop working without reference to his or her ability to do a particular job. The presumption here is that once a person reaches 67, he or she will be unable to continue working, without reference to that individual’s particular circumstance which might demonstrate a capacity that is inconsistent with that of other persons in their age group.
The BIDC issue takes this principle a step further and fundamentally argues that an entity can force retirement on an individual, even before 67 on the basis of contested governmental regulations. The validity of the regulation is one matter; however, this article is concerned with our views of the wider issue of discrimination. This was explored, albeit accidentally, in a 2013 CADRES study that was commissioned by the HIV/AIDS Commission and sought to measure our tolerance for different types of discrimination. The critical data are presented here and were based on a question to respondents which asked them “if they thought it was acceptable to treat people differently” on the basis of the five characteristics identified.
The responses demonstrate that Barbadians are as comfortable with age discrimination as they are with discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (within the survey’s margin of error). Numerically this translates to somewhere in the vicinity of 50,000 people or close to “1” in “5” persons who think that age discrimination is acceptable. Their justification was not explored, but anecdotally one can assume that we believe age discrimination can be justified because older people are physically less able to do some things which younger people can and should therefore give way. This is not an unreasonable proposition and it is supported by a more social argument that moving older people out of the work force creates space at the bottom for the larger number of school leavers and also facilitates their promotion.
There is, however, another angle to this discussion which relates to “our” logic which appears contradictory. The chart demonstrates the existence of two levels of tolerance for discrimination which can be labelled the higher and lower levels of tolerance. We have a lower level of tolerance for racial and sex/gender discrimination presumably because we do not select our race or sex; however, religion also falls within that category and contrary to popular belief that is chosen. On the higher level of tolerance it is ironic that age discrimination shares a space with discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation since the majority in the population believe that we choose the latter and not the former. Simply put, therefore, Barbadians acknowledge that one has no control over one’s age, but consider it to be more acceptable to discriminate on that basis than it is to discriminate against one on the basis of a chosen religion, which is “odd”.
These data demonstrates the extent to which this population could be persuaded to accept the need to retire workers on account of age in some circumstances. It is therefore unfortunate that the BIDC action was not preceded by a mature discussion about age discrimination in much the say way that we started to speak about privatisation, since it is clear now that the issue has been politicised and any such opportunity has been lost.
Peter W. Wickham is a political consultant and a director of Caribbean Development Research Services (CADRES). Email [email protected]