Supreme Court Today

By DAVID STOUT
Published: June 20, 2008
WASHINGTON — In a ruling of potential interest for older workers across the country, the Supreme Court made it easier on Thursday for workers to contend that they are being discriminated against by their employers because of their age.
In a 7-to-1 ruling, the court ruled that it is up to the employer to show that action against a worker stems from “reasonable factors other than age.” The question in the case, one of three involving labor relations issued by the court on Thursday, was whether the burden rested on the employer or on an employee bringing a suit.
The age-bias ruling, written by Justice David H. Souter, acknowledged that “there is no denying that putting employers to the work of persuading fact-finders that their choices are reasonable makes it harder and costlier to defend” age-bias accusations and that the ruling “will sometimes affect the way employers do business with their employees.”
Nevertheless, Justice Souter wrote, the language of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 makes it clear that Congress wanted the burden to be on the employer. When the case was argued on April 23, lawyers on the side of the workers asserted that the intent of Congress was clear, since the 1967 statute provides for “reasonable factors other than age” to protect employers from liability.
If Congress offered employers such a defense, the lawyers argued, it must be up to them to prove their case. Justice Souter essentially agreed, writing that the concerns of those who feel otherwise “have to be directed at Congress, which set the balance where it is.”
“We have to read it the way Congress wrote it,” Justice Souter wrote. Agreeing with him were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel A. Alito Jr. Justice Antonin Scalia concurred in the overall judgment, though not all of Justice Souter’s reasoning.
The case decided on Thursday concerned two dozen workers at an upstate New York federal research laboratory. When the federal government ordered the contractor that runs the lab, Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, also known as KAPL Inc., to reduce its force, the contractor had its managers rate their subordinates on “performance,” “flexibility,” and “critical skills.”
Thirty-one employees were let go, and all but one were over 40, the age at which the age-discrimination law begins to apply. Most of the affected employees joined a suit contending there was no justification for using an evaluation system that had just a starkly disparate impact on older workers.
The workers prevailed in a jury trial, winning awards that ranged from $69,000 to more than $1 million, but lost before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which concluded that that the burden of proof rested on the workers, rather than the employer, and threw out the awards. Thursday’s ruling by the high court overturned the Second Circuit and sent the case back to the lower courts.
In dissenting Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas said that, while he thought the Second Circuit was wrong in putting the burden on workers, other elements of the case required him to support its judgment. Justice Stephen G. Breyer did not take part in the case, apparently because his private investments would have created a conflict.
The Bush administration sided with the workers on grounds that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has interpreted the 1967 law as putting the burden of proof on employers, not workers.
Seth P. Waxman, solicitor general in the administration of President Bill Clinton, argued on behalf of the employer. He maintained that plaintiffs should have to prove discrimination, since age, unlike race or sex, “often does correlate with reasonable employment factors.”
The other labor relations cases decided on Thursday were Chamber of Commerce of the United States v. Brown, in which the justices struck down a California law that blocked use of state money for anti-union activities, and Kentucky Retirement Systems v. E.E.O.C., in which the court ruled that Kentucky’s retirement system does not discriminate against older workers. Those decisions and the one in the age-discrimination case are at the Supreme Court site.