6 Former Employees Suing Hotel : Burbank: Workers say they were fired or forced out because of their ages or their accents. A co-owner of the Hilton at the airport denies the charges.

Six former employees of the Burbank Airport Hilton have filed lawsuits contending that they were fired or forced out of their jobs because they were too old or spoke English with an accent, and at least three more ex-workers intend to sue the hotel with similar claims, attorneys said Friday.

The plaintiffs’ positions ranged from laborers to high-level managers at the Burbank hotel, and their native tongues include Spanish, Hungarian and Dutch as well as English.

All of them are over 40 years old and all lost their jobs within six months after a new general manager who was in his 30s arrived at the hotel in 1991 and let it be known he wanted “new, young blood and new, young ideas,” the suits allege.

In addition, General Manager Tim Ellis allegedly commented “that all the people who don’t speak English fluently should be gotten rid of,” said attorney Marcus A. Mancini of Universal City, who filed five of the lawsuits and plans to file three more. Ellis is not named as a defendant in those suits.

A sixth case, on behalf of a Texas woman claiming only age discrimination, was filed by attorney Michael J. Faber of Santa Monica. All are pending in the Burbank and Glendale branches of Superior Court.

Developer Lewis N. Wolff, a co-owner of the hotel and one of the defendants, denied the allegations and vowed to fight the cases without settling them out of court “because this is really a slur on my reputation.

“We’ve been in business about 25 years, in different businesses, and we’ve never discriminated against age to my knowledge,” Wolff said.

His attorney, Stacy D. Shartin, said the claims have no merit.

“I’ve represented this company for years and they have, in my experience, an impeccable record of dealing with their employees,” Shartin said. “I think they have an ethnically and racially and accent-wise very diverse work force.”

Mancini and Faber disagreed, saying Wolff and his partners wanted the hotel’s employees to project a slick new image to attract more business after an adjacent convention center opened.

“All you have to do is look at the number of employees over 40 fired in such a short period of time for confirmation of that,” Faber said.

Faber’s client, 42-year-old Dorris Danner, had been the director of catering at the hotel for several months when the new management team arrived, and her personnel file contained “only laudatory reviews and memoranda from her superiors,” Faber said.

“As soon as they came in--boom--she’s gone and so were all these other clients that Marcus Mancini is representing,” Faber said.

Donner, whose replacement was several years younger, has since returned to her home state of Texas, where she is working for an Omni International Hotel in Houston, he said.

Mancini said his clients similarly lost their jobs despite good work records.

The highest-ranking employee among them, Joseph Nagy, 53, was director of food and beverage service, a $65,000-a-year job in which he supervised five other managers and dozens of workers. The native of Hungary was replaced by a 34-year-old American.

The other plaintiffs include Frank Alvarez, 54, originally from Mexico, who was bar manager; Hungarian native Peter Rozsa, 51, who was a musician and entertainer at the hotel; Hungarian native Eva Sparks, 54, who was assistant restaurant manager, and Dutchman Fred Van Den Berg, 51, who was assistant banquet manager.

All were fired except Sparks, who felt she had no choice but to resign after she was passed over for the job of restaurant manager in favor of a 25-year-old woman hired from outside the hotel, Mancini said.

Her decision was influenced by the managers’ ongoing remarks about employees’ ages and national origins, he added, alleging that the new restaurant manager told Rozsa when she fired him:

“Your music and you are too old for the Hilton. Besides, I’m getting rid of the Hungarians anyways.”