Court Bolsters Law Against Age Discrimination

Older workers who lose their jobs to someone younger have a claim of illegal age bias, even if the replacement worker is older than 40, too, the Supreme Court said Monday.

The ruling strengthens the federal law against age discrimination at a time when thousands of workers, many of them over 40, are losing their jobs because of corporate downsizings.

The decision does not necessarily mean that such laid-off workers will be able to win an age-bias suit, legal experts said, but it will give more of them a chance to try.

On a 9-0 vote, the justices revived a discrimination claim brought by a 56-year-old worker whose boss told him that he was “too damn old for this kind of work.”

“It’s about time we started to get some young blood into this company,” the same supervisor said. Two days later, the sales force was reorganized and the older worker, James O’Connor, was dismissed.

Two lower courts dismissed O’Connor’s age-bias lawsuit before trial because he was replaced by a 40-year-old.

Some workers’ rights advocates said that they had hoped the high court’s ruling would reverse a general skepticism toward age-bias claims on the part of some federal judges.

“This [decision] makes it easier for plaintiffs to get to first base in an age-discrimination case. And I think it will force courts to pay more attention to the evidence that is there,” said Tom Osborne, a worker’s rights expert with the American Assn. of Retired Persons.

Recently, some judges have said that replacing a 60-year-old worker with a 50-year-old does not amount to illegal age discrimination because both are covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. The law says that it applies to employees “who are at least 40 years of age.”

But in a brief opinion, the high court rejected that view as ridiculous.

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“So long as [the employee] lost out because of his age,” he suffered age discrimination, said Justice Antonin Scalia for the court. The fact that he was replaced by another person over age 40 is “utterly irrelevant,” he said.

Employers are entitled to replace high-cost workers for economic reasons under federal law but they may not do so simply to get a younger force. Sometimes, the line between acceptable cost cutting and illegal age bias is a fine one, experts said.

Monday’s ruling could open the courthouse doors to more legal attacks on companies that are laying off older workers.

“Corporations will have to be more careful on downsizings,” said St. John’s University Law Prof. David L. Gregory. “If they are not, they will give rise to thousands of claims [of age bias] and the legal cost will be tremendous.”

Unlike victims of race or sex discrimination, employees who lose their jobs to age bias cannot win general damages from their employer. If successful, they can win only back pay and the right to reinstatement in their jobs.

O’Connor appeared to have a strong claim. He had worked for a North Carolina supplier of vending machines for 12 years when he was fired.

His supervisor, Ed Williams, had told him in front of other people that he was “too old.”

But a federal judge in Charlotte threw out his suit and said that O’Connor had no claim because he was replaced by a 40-year-old. The U.S. appeals court in Richmond agreed, saying that the many comments about his age were “apparently humorous” and “create no inference of age bias.”

The justices reversed that decision (O’Connor vs. Consolidated Coin Caterers Corp., 95-354) and said that replacing one worker with someone who is “substantially younger” is a clear indicator of age bias.

Scalia did not define what he meant by “substantially younger.” Replacing a 68-year-old with a 65-year-old would probably not indicate age bias, he commented, but replacing a 56-year-old with a 40-year-old does create a strong inference of bias.

The ruling does not mean that the fired worker has won his suit. The company now will be given a chance to argue that it had legitimate, nonage related reasons for dismissing O’Connor.

In other action, the court agreed to decide whether the Constitution allows a California county to elect judges by district, rather than countywide, for the purpose of electing more Latinos.

Latinos make up one-third of the population in Monterey County, but before 1994, no Latino had been elected as a municipal judge.

In response to a voting-rights suit, the county was divided into seven districts, two of which elected Latinos. But in November, a panel of three federal judges reversed course and ruled that Monterey must return to countywide elections.

Citing the recent Supreme Court rulings on racial gerrymandering in congressional districts, the three-judge panel said that it “is particularly doubtful . . . whether race-based election areas can withstand constitutional scrutiny.”

Latino activists appealed, and the justices agreed to hear the case in the fall (Lopez vs. Monterey County, 95-1201).