BOSTON (Legal Newsline) - An engineer who was fired in his mid-50s can sue Schneider Electric for age discrimination because there was plenty of evidence managers were under pressure to use a “reduction in force” to make room for what they described as “young talent,” a Massachusetts appeals court ruled.
The majority decision affirmed the liberal standard Massachusetts courts should use when assessing evidence of discrimination, under which a judge or jury can look behind a company’s stated reasons for terminating employees to conclude the real purpose was unlawful discrimination. Two justices dissented, saying the average age in the plaintiff’s department barely budged, undercutting the idea age discrimination was involved.
Mark Adams was on Schneider’s “Battery A-Team,” based outside Boston and traveling around the world to investigate product failures and visit suppliers. In October 2015, a manager in Schneider’s information technology division e-mailed the human resources leader for Adams’ division that it “needs age diversity.”
“The embedded system team leader recognizes this and has been stocking his team with younger talent,” the executive wrote. “I’d like to encourage this more.”
In 2016 and 2017 Schneider conducted three rounds of firings, with 23 of 24 terminated employees over the age of 40 and 22 over 50. In January 2017, Kenneth Colby, newly advanced to director of battery engineering, was told he needed to cut 22% of his budget. Since the majority of the budget for his 45-member team was payroll, Colby had to cut jobs. Colby testified he made a spreadsheet ranking each employee according to strengths, weaknesses and importance to the division and fired Adams on Jan. 27, 2017. Adams declined the severance package and sued for age discrimination instead.
A trial court dismissed his case, but the Massachusetts Appeals court reinstated it in an Aug. 17 decision by Judge Vickie Henry. She said the case presented “something rarely seen in discrimination cases: an e-mail trail documenting that Schneider was so concerned about its `aging’ Boston work force that it instituted a series of reductions in force designed to shed older workers to make room for `young talent.’”
The e-mails by executives above Colby were evidence enough of “a pervasive and explicit corporate strategy to terminate some older workers to make room to hire younger workers,” the court ruled. “On this basis alone, the motion for summary judgment should have been denied.”
Schneider argued Colby had testified he was the sole decisionmaker over who to fire and only discussed his decision with superiors when he needed their final approval. The appeals court said a judge or jury was free to conclude he was lying. The fact Colby chose eight workers over 50 to fire “is evidence he understood the company strategy to discriminate,” the court ruled.
Even if Colby was an “innocent pawn” of higher managers, the court added, a fact-finder might conclude the entire RIF was illegal. It doesn’t matter that many older workers survived, either.
“Adams need only prove Schneider made progress towards its stated goal, not that it reached perfection,” the court concluded.
Judge William Meade dissented, joined by Sabita Singh. No reasonable jury could find Adams was discriminated against given the evidence, he wrote, including statistics showing the average age of employees in his group only fell from 48.9 years to 47.1 years, with five employees over 62 surviving the RIF. The majority also said jurors could simply ignore Colby’s testimony he was the sole decisionmaker, but Justice Meade said they couldn’t do so when Adams didn’t provide any proof other executives were involved.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that companies can fire older, higher-paid employees as part of a general cost-saving strategy, since that can be a reasonable way to preserve the greatest number of jobs. But the appeals court said the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court “has not indicated whether it agrees,” and the issue could be “significant in a case like this” where a department leader has to meet a specific budget reduction amount.