Employment Law. I love a legal argument, just great. At the moment there is no case law, but if an airline state that you have to do certain courses with certain training providers in order to get employment with that airline and that training provider has an arbitary age limit then I think the age limit by CTC of 34 can mean that the airline can be legally challenged on the grounds of indirect discrimination. The same legal principle already exists on grounds of gender, race and disability so I am very confident that it will cross over to this issue.
I spoke with an airline at the BALPA EOC last month and challenged them on CTC recruitment. They tried to distance themselves until my friend pointed out to them that they specifically mentioned and linked to CTC on their website where it stated in no uncertain terms that if you want employment with us, these are the training providers you need to use. That airline got very uncomfortable under that questioning and I would say they were embarrassed. Hopefully, they might exert some pressure soon and change the age thing at CTC. Moral and ethical trading I think is the term.
The other thing to bear in mind is that bad press clearly hurts airlines. I am not sure how comfortable the airlines and others will feel if CTC's entry requirements remain unchanged. Suppose CTC said, "white males only" - I have no doubt that any airline (certainly in the UK and other western countries) wouldn't associate themselves with CTC because it is against race relations law and also really bad
PR, so what is in it for an airline to associate themselves with a training provider who discriminate on the ground of age. Also, rejecting people because of their ethnic origin is just ignorance of the highest order and no one can argue against that - well the same is true of age!
As BALPA says, age discrimination is a totally wasteful practice. There can be absolutely no justification for an arbitary age limit of 34. If airlines want the best people for the job then they have to get rid of their prejudices and seek to cast a recruitment net as wide as possible to seek the more able candidates. That means chosing training providers with no sexist, racist and ageist recruitment policies. Ultimately it reflects back at the airline in terms of
PR but also in terms of an overall weakened quality of staff. It is just bad for business and profits if you employ staff based on unjustified and arbitary policies.
If you have a robust selection procedure then you can weed out unsuitable candidates on their ability and not age. Being cheeky now, a quick glance at the above replies suggests to me that me that a lot of you young types can't even do maths, so to use an argument for age discrimination, I would say that only those above 34 should be considered for CTC! Of course that argument is rubbish because you can't say that, in all cases, those under 34 are not suitable for training so why use that argument to exclude people over 34? In fact, my mom says that anybody (except girls) under the age of 30 should be barred from flying passenger jets. Her logic is that almost 60% of all road accidents (help me out on that stat BigMister) are caused by males under the age of 30; "if they can't drive a car what chance of them being able to fly a 737!"
I think the days of CTC's and others age discrimination policies are limited. If they don't change then I know the airlines will select other training providers because otherwise it will cost the airlines dearly.