In many cases, it would cost your boss more to replace you than pay you a raise

[Gailete]

I remember my one bonus was for $1500 as a sign on for RN's. When I got it, I had lost $700 to taxes as it was paid out along with my regular paycheck. I took a cruise with it.

A few years later at the same place, lay offs were rampant. Two other nurses had started at the same time as I did. One day we had a private chat in the med room and found out that we all had a consensus that the administration was out to get us. In length of career time, I was a baby, and actually the youngest of the group one of them was retired from the VA, and another had been a nurse for quite awhile. What we realized was we were 'old' and two of them had long enough nursing careers, me I had already hurt my back keeping a one of their patients from falling so I was a liability. They wanted us and our slightly bigger paychecks out of there. Hard though to find enough to make a case against good nurses. But it was rough living through that. I still remember having a supervisor writing me up for supposedly being disorganized as I had a few minutes and was catching up on my notes instead of downstairs smoking! Of course no concrete illustration of how I was disorganized. A week later the same supervisor wrote me up again stating I was MUCH improved. The only difference? I made sure she never saw me for the entire week!

Things like this makes it so hard to function at work when women get older and CFOs start making calculations to see how much cheaper they could get workers for, and so for profit organizations are always going to want to let the better paid, more knowledgeable workers go. The more they save the higher the CEOs pay goes up.

[~bs]

employment is "at will", and they dont really need an excuse to fire you, as long as it can't be proved they violated EEO. The easiest, most common excuse is downsizing. They'll downsize your section by laying you off, then "reorganize" it by hiring new employees for less and changing the duties somewhat. NOT ethical, but it's done all the time.

As far as ageism, I do think both sexes are discriminated against. It's my opinion that they may find it "easier" on their conscience to cut single men as opposed by a female with kids hence texashusker's comment. Plus men may just accept the layoff, while a woman may be more willing raise a case with the company legally and on social media, dealing the company a PR black eye. This is all conjecture, of course.... but just consider a scenario where HR needs to decide to decide to layoff one of two employees whos work product is identical. Who are they going to layoff, the single mother of 2 children or a single male bachelor? Again, violating EEO, but HR breaks those rules with impunity.