Surely we’re getting close to the death of the Ok Boomer meme. The Today Show ran a segment discussing whether or not the phrase was comparable to racial abuse, a politician used it in parliament, and I’ve got bets on how long it’s going to take before someone uses it in a marketing campaign. If those weren’t enough though, there’s no way that it will survive becoming the focus of a boomer lawsuit.
The piece of legislation that covers age discrimination over the the USA is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA). It prohibits discrimination for people over 40, but it doesn’t stop people discriminating against young people, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The argument that seems to be coming up now is that people saying ‘Ok Boomer’ over and over again is creating a hostile work environment, and is discrimination based on age.
Joseph Sirback, a labour and employment attorney with Cozen O’Connor has gone so far as to say that “as the phrase enters our vocabulary, the use of ‘OK boomer’ in the workplace could be sufficient evidence of age-based hostility to support a lawsuit under the ADEA”.
There hasn’t been a lawsuit yet, but now that this information is out in public, we all know it’s just a matter of time.
All this Ok Boomer stuff will die down eventually, and people will stop yelling about how it’s offensive to boomers. It might take a while, but it will disappear. Maybe instead, the states should focus on the fact that they have almost no safeguards in place to make sure that trans people aren’t fired for their gender identity.
Just as a suggestion, that just seems like an issue that it would be more worthwhile to focus on.
Back home in Aus, I’m very glad to tell you that our age discrimination legislation protects people of all ages, not just over 40s. That’s not going to stop someone trying to sue over ‘Ok Boomer’, but it means that if anyone starts hitting back with ‘Ok Millennial’ then it’s fair legal game.