For US baby boomers morphing into older employees, an attorney draws on many years of experience in employment discrimination for a timely review of age-related stereotypes, discriminatory workplace practices, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, recommendations for ADEA changes, and recourse options. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Age Discrimination looks at how both young and old can be penalised by prejudice against their age group. Following recent changes in the law, the issue of age discrimination has come to the fore. The new legislation will extend legal oversight of age-related discrimination to the provision of facilities, goods and services, as well as employment. Professor Sargeant provides a thorough review of the consequences of these changes and their implications for businesses and service providers, public or private. This comprehensive new book, like its predecessor Age Discrimination in Employment, is essential to practitioners responsible for HR issues, finance, operations, service delivery, quality and customer relations, and for those with a policy focus or academic interest in diversity issues.

It is no secret that since the 1980s, American workers have lost power vis-à-vis employers through the well-chronicled steep decline in private sector unionization. American workers have also lost power in other ways. Those alleging employment discrimination have fared increasingly poorly in the courts. In recent years, judges have dismissed scores of cases in which workers presented evidence that supervisors referred to them using racial or gender slurs. In one federal district court, judges dismissed more than 80 percent of the race discrimination cases filed over a year. And when juries return verdicts in favor of employees, judges often second guess those verdicts, finding ways to nullify the jury's verdict and rule in favor of the employer. Most Americans assume that that an employee alleging workplace discrimination faces the same legal system as other litigants. After all, we do not usually think that legal rules vary depending upon the type of claim brought. The employment law scholars Sandra A. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas show in Unequal that our assumptions are wrong. Over the course of the last half century, employment discrimination claims have come to operate in a fundamentally different legal system than other claims. It is in many respects a parallel universe, one in which the legal system systematically favors employers over employees. A host of procedural, evidentiary, and substantive mechanisms serve as barriers for employees, making it extremely difficult for them to access the courts. Moreover, these mechanisms make it fairly easy for judges to dismiss a case prior to trial. Americans are unaware of how the system operates partly because they think that race and gender discrimination are in the process of fading away. But such discrimination still happens in the workplace, and workers now have little recourse to fight it legally. By tracing the modern history of employment discrimination, Sperino and Thomas provide an authoritative account of how our legal system evolved into an institution that is inherently biased against workers making rights claims.