Older workers need not prove intentional bias
on Mar 30, 2005 at 10:21 am
The Supreme Court, in a sweeping legal victory for older workers, ruled 5-3 Wednesday that employees need not show intentional discrimination against them based on age in order to win a case under federal law. They can prevail on a theory that an employer’s job practice had a more negative impact on older than younger workers, the Court said.
Generally speaking, it is much easier to prove that bias resulted in practical application of an employer’s policy than that the employer specifically intended to discriminate. Thus, the new decision could be a major boon to discrimination cases affecting the rights of more than 70 million workers who are 40 and over — about half of the nation’s civilian work force.
Resolving a conflict among lower courts on the coverage of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the Court said that proof of discriminatory intent is not required. But, it said, the scope of ADEA’s protection in disparate impact cases is narrower than under another anti-discrimination law, Title VII of federal civil rights law, because ADEA sometimes allows employers to adopt policies that treat workers differently if those are based on factors other than age.
The Court, in fact, ruled against the specific bias claim in the case of Smith v. City of Jackson (03-1160)– a claim that older police officers and public safety dispatchers were treated unequally under the city’s performance pay plan. Thus, the Court affirmed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling against those 30 individuals, even while overturning the Circuit’s view that ADEA only covers intentional bias in the workplace. (Marty Lederman’s post below provides links to the Court’s opinions in the case.)
Justice John Paul Stevens and three other members of the Court — Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter — flatly concluded that disparate impact claims were covered. Justice Antonin Scalia provided a fifth vote for the result, by saying the Court should defer to the view of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that ADEA does apply to such claims.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, concluded in dissent that ADEA does not protect against unintentional discrimination.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist took no part in the decision.
In another ruling Wednesday, the Court concluded — by unanimous vote but for varying reasons among the Justices — that U.S. District Courts have the authority to issue a stay of a pending habeas case to allow the prisoner to return to state court to exhaust claims there, and then return to federal court. That ruling came in the case of Rhines v. Weber (03-9046). Justice O’Connor wrote the lead opinion.
By a unanimous vote in another case, the Court narrowed the restrictions it had imposed initially in 1923 on the right of a loser in a state court lawsuit to sue in U.S. District Court. The so-called “Rooker-Feldman doctrine,” the Court ruled Wednesday, “is confined to cases…brought by state-court losers complaining of injuries caused by state-court judgments rendered before the District Court proceedings commenced and inviting District Court review and rejection of those judgments.” Otherwise, the Court said in the opinion by Justice Ginsburg, the doctrine does not displace the power of federal courts to stay or dismiss proceedings in deference to state courts. (The case was Exxon Mobil v. Saudi Basic Industries, 03-1696.)
In the Court’s ruling on the scope of age bias claims under federal law, the Stevens plurality relied heavily upon the Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power recognizing a right to pursue disparate impact claims under Title VII. In that decision, the Court had said that Congress enacted Title VII to deal with “the consequences of employment practices, not simply the motivation.” The text of ADEA, Stevens wrote, focuses — as Title VII does — on “the effects of the acdtion on the employee rather than the motivation for the action of the employer.” The language of the two laws is parallel, according to the plurality.
But, Stevens said, disparate impact coverage under ADEA is narrower than it is under Title VII because ADEA allows for differiing employment practices “based on reasonable factors other than age.” In the Jackson policy pay case, Stevens’ concluded, the city’s decision to key pay to performance was a reasonable way to bring salaries of lower echelon employees — usually, younger workers — in line with pay scales of surrounding police forces.
The older workers’ lawsuit, Stevens wrote, involved little more than a claim “that the pay plan at issue is relatively less generous to older workers than to younger workers.”
[Disclosure: Goldstein & Howe represented the petitioners and Tom Goldstein argued the case.]
