A schoolteacher who got promoted to Assistant Head of School, only to have her position eliminated, felt that the school should have explored other alternatives. She believed this demonstrated a pretext for age discrimination. She was wrong. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) prohibits private employers from firing an…
A 30-plus-year employee found out the hard way that missing a deadline — by just 24 hours — to arbitrate her claim against her former employer under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act is enough to lose it forever when her brief delay violates the plain terms of an arbitration…
Is it age bias? Or just business? In a decision I read last night, the plaintiff spent more than two decades working as a system technician for the defendant. According to the defendant, it made a business decision to terminate all employees holding the plaintiff’s position because of COVID-19 and…
There will come a time in your HR or employment law career when you must respond to a Charge of Discrimination filed with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by filing a position statement. The EEOC has a great resource on effective position statements and stresses that the position…
Reductions in force are bad enough. Don’t let decisionmakers mishandle them and create litigation risks. The plaintiff in this case had worked for his current employer and its three predecessors for over 27 years in tech-related positions. He was 58 years old. In 2017, the plaintiff began reporting to a…
They were so bad that a federal judge applied a rarely-used rule of civil procedure to consider summary judgment on its own after identifying for the parties material facts that may not be genuinely in dispute. Boy, that was about as witty as Groundskeeper Willie’s standup routine at Springfield Elementary. (Note…
Proving age discrimination can be difficult because plaintiffs must ultimately establish that their age was a determinative factor in the defendant’s decision. In other words, if not for the plaintiff’s age, the [adverse employment action] would not have occurred. In failure-to-hire cases, the burden of proof is especially difficult since…
If you’re 67 years old, you work in human resources, and you happen to hear those words from the company’s U.S. president, it may be time to dust off the old resume. Or contact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The HR Manager for a Swiss-based national manufacturer did the latter.…
That’s the vibe I got from reading this recent Fifth Circuit decision affirming the lower court’s dismissal of age discrimination claims. The plaintiff was one of five Zone Human Resources Directors (ZHRDs) for the defendant. Each ZHRD had its own zone. In 2018, the defendant decided that each ZHRD would…
An HR employee claimed that her age motivated her employer’s decision not to select her for a Human Resources Talent Consultant (HRTC) position after the company restructured the HR Department. Why? Because decision-makers allegedly said on a conference call that they were looking for “fresh new blood” to fill the…