If a company has a bimodal age distribution, the question to be asking is "Why didn't they think about hiring someone occasionally over the last 15-20 years?" Of course, the answer is that no corporate manager wanted to miss his number by hiring another person.

So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit.

> Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors.

Everybody gets old, you know.

Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.

> Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.

Agreed. But the same anti-union people are also against anti-monopoly regulations.

> Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.

This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.

Only when the management's time horizon is short.

It probably would have been prudent to do a long term ROI on those layoffs. Slashing the executive bonus pool may have reduced those layoffs significantly and saved the company far more down the line.

Well, suppose for a moment the position or job really was "dying", though. (Which is hard to predict accurately, but everybody gets pessimistic in times of huge layoffs.)

Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.