Lockheed Martin Settles Age-Bias Suit
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Thursday announced a $13-million settlement to one of the nation’s biggest age bias lawsuits, affecting 2,000 former employees of Martin Marietta Corp.
U.S. District Judge Wiley Y. Daniel in Denver gave preliminary approval to the settlement, which also calls for the rehiring of 450 former employees who were targets of age discrimination at Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin Astronautics. The EEOC said 204 of them have been rehired since August.
The EEOC lawsuit, originally filed in May 1994, claimed Martin targeted employees age 40 and over for a series of massive layoffs and forced retirements over a five-year period beginning in 1990.
“This is one of the largest commitments to rehire class members [of a lawsuit] ever obtained,” said EEOC Chairman Gilbert F. Casellas.
Michael Kramer, vice president and general counsel for the astronautics unit, said the decision to settle the case doesn’t imply that Martin Marietta violated any laws in reducing its 12,000 Denver work force by one-half.
“We strongly deny age was a consideration” in deciding which workers were to be fired, Kramer said.
The $13-million settlement affects an estimated 2,000 former employees who were laid off between Jan. 1, 1990, and Dec. 31, 1994, from nonunion jobs at Martin’s Astronautics Group.
Payments also will go to affected former workers in the Information & Communications System sector of the company’s Information Systems Group in Colorado.
Martin also agreed to provide free outplacement services for two years to every former employee who completes a claim form notifying the company of an interest in these services.
Moreover, the settlement calls for the company to pay for up to two retraining courses per semester and as many as eight courses for settlement participants. The courses, to be offered by the company, will be designed to upgrade former workers’ engineering and computer skills.
The settlement also calls for Martin managers to be retrained in nondiscriminatory decision-making and in how to handle layoffs.
As part of the settlement, the company did not admit discrimination, Casellas said.
The EEOC said it will monitor compliance for five years.
EEOC General Counsel C. Gregory Stewart said the settlement means that “valuable employees are being reemployed or retrained” by Martin.
EEOC officials said they could only prove statistically that Martin Marietta discriminated against 330 older workers, and that the company agreed to rehire 450. As for the 1,500 workers not included in the rehiring program, the EEOC said they will share in the $13-million settlement.
After embarking on an ambitious course of mergers, Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin now is the world’s largest aerospace and defense company.
