Fighting Age Discrimination in the Courts

The settlement from Ruby Tuesday felt great, Cardwell says, but it did not change much. He was still an older man in need of a job. Absent one, he's had to scale back his retirement plans.

"It's a terrible feeling,” Cardwell says. “It gets you down in the dumps. The bills keep coming. You want to do your part and contribute to your family, but you can't do it. You are being blocked at every direction."

photo of Julianne Taaffe, left, and Kathryn Moon by Stephen Voss

Kathryn Moon and Julianne Taaffe

The case: Ohio State University

From the outside, the case of two instructors who won an age discrimination lawsuit against Ohio State University seems like a great success story for older workers. But Kathryn Moon, 68, and Julianne Taaffe, 64, are not sure the impact of their lawsuit will spur the changes they sought.

In 2014, Moon and Taaffe, both veteran instructors of English as a second language (ESL) at the university, retired early after feeling pressure from administrators who they believed were trying to squeeze out older workers.

With the help of AARP Foundation lawyers and an Ohio law firm, the women decided to sue. In the federal age discrimination lawsuit, Moon and Taaffe said Ohio State attempted to push out older workers by making their work lives miserable. They were passed over for preferred work assignments that went to younger workers, they say. Older workers were referred to by managers as “millstones” and “deadwood,” and one boss sent an email to a colleague that ended up being forwarded to staff members that compared managing the older staff to “herding hippos."

"They made explicit references to our age and the desire to get rid of us,” Moon says. “They wanted a new look."

In 2018, the university settled the instructors’ lawsuit, after the EEOC found there was reasonable cause to believe the university violated the ADEA. Both women received back pay and benefits from Ohio State, and both are again teaching at the university.

Moon and Taaffe say the years spent fighting the university were financially and emotionally crippling. Taaffe and her husband considered selling their home and putting off dental care. She lost 23 pounds from the stress. Moon developed back problems and put off maintenance on her home. But aside from the financial stress, both women say they lost part of their identities when they left work before they intended.

The women are happy to be employed, but returning to Ohio State hasn't been easy. And they are not convinced that what happened to them won't happen to others at the university.

"It was a good thing to get a job back,” says Moon. “But the fight is far from over."

As part of the settlement, Ohio State agreed to put in place policies and staff training to help prevent age discrimination. But the women believe the university is dragging its feet, which makes their personal victory less fulfilling. “We are sitting here every day seeing that nothing has changed and that the university is not willing to do the work that needs to be done to make sure it doesn't happen again,” Taaffe says.

As part of the settlement, Ohio State agreed to review within a year its policies for preventing and investigating discrimination. Moon and Taaffe are concerned that's not happening. In July, the women sued the university for access to records pertaining to the review. A spokesman for the university said “Ohio State is committed to a diverse community, equal opportunity and eliminating discrimination.” While a review of the university's policy for preventing and investigating discrimination is ongoing, an interim policy took effect in August. The spokesman also said the university has instituted a “second-look process” for age-based complaints in the college where the women work.

photo of Brian Reid by Robyn Twomey

Brian Reid

The case: Google

In July, Google agreed to pay $11 million to settle a federal lawsuit that alleged it discriminated against hundreds of job seekers over 40. If that felt like a victory for older workers, to Brian Reid, a computer scientist who fought a similar battle against the tech giant more than a decade ago, it felt like déjà vu — and further evidence that little has changed in Silicon Valley.

In 2012, Google settled an age discrimination case brought by Reid, who was hired by the company in 2002 at age 52 and laid off two years later. Reid's complaint alleged that he was let go because of his age, even after receiving a good performance review. According to the complaint, his supervisors and coworkers often made derogatory comments about his age and told him his ideas were “obsolete” and “too old to matter.” (He declined to comment on his case against Google.)

Reid, who is now 70 and has continued to work in tech, says he thinks age discrimination remains a significant problem in the tech industry, where aggressive companies value the new and fresh at the expense of the deep knowledge and experience older workers bring. He thinks that culture sometimes leads tech firms to make poor decisions they might not make if more experienced workers were involved.

"It's the nature of engineers to not read history,” Reid said. “Anything that happened before their freshman year in college is irrelevant to them.”

Reid also thinks the go-go culture and high-pressure competitive nature of tech firms is to blame for the value they place on young workers. Managers understand that age discrimination is against the law, Reid asserts, but they don't worry much about it.

"There is a sense of ‘we are going to do it anyhow, because if we don't do those things, we are going to come in second,’ “ he explains.

Reid said he began to feel age discrimination in his early 50s, before he was hired by Google. Younger colleagues increasingly began prefacing questions to him with condescending explanations of the technical vocabulary. He compared it to mansplaining, the term women use to describe men who explain things in a condescending and overconfident tone.

"I was experiencing ‘youngsplaining,’ “ Reid says. “It was like, ‘Let me, as a person who owns my own skateboard, explain this to you.’ “

Seven years after the settlement with Google, Reid thinks his case has had an impact mainly in the courts; it is often cited when others bring discrimination lawsuits. Yet he doubts it had much impact on the culture of Silicon Valley and age discrimination.

"I think this is a permanent part of the 21st century and the tech industry,” he says. “It's like crime on the subway."

photo of Walter Mikulan by Stephen Voss

Walter Mikulan

The case: Allegheny County Jail

At 64, Walter Mikulan is near the age when he imagined he would be considering retirement. As it happened, that came much earlier than he planned.

In 2017, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, paid a $1.15 million settlement to Mikulan, a former major at the Allegheny County Jail who filed an age discrimination case after he was fired in 2013 at 58.

Mikulan, who lives outside Pittsburgh, declined to comment on the specifics of his case, citing a nondisclosure agreement he signed as part of the settlement agreement with the county.

But Mikulan, who worked for nearly 30 years at the jail, says the process of fighting the lawsuit, and of losing his job long before he was eligible for Social Security and Medicare, was life-changing. If he hadn't received the settlement, it also would have been financially devastating.

Soon after he was fired, Mikulan's wife received an ovarian cancer diagnosis, and the couple had to pay for their own health insurance. Mikulan had been making nearly $40 an hour at the jail. To make ends meet, he took a job as a high school security officer for $10 an hour.

"You spend your life working, and then one day you are faced with bankruptcy,” says Mikulan. “Thank God my wife and I are savers, and we had a little money to fall back on. It's a terrifying experience."

Mikulan says he was the first of his friends to experience the end of a career before traditional retirement age and to fail to find a comparable job to replace his income. But he wasn't the last. In time, many of his friends would live through the experience, and Mikulan would talk them through it. “The late 50s, that's a target date to kick you out the door,” he says.

According to his complaint against Allegheny County, Mikulan was pushed out of his job by the warden of the jail. For many of Mikulan's friends, proving age discrimination was much more difficult. Employers are often savvy, he said, and age discrimination is nearly impossible to prove.

Two years after the settlement, Mikulan has not gone back to work, although he has applied for several high-level corrections jobs. He worries the lawsuit may have tarnished his name. Or maybe, he fears, it's his age. He still spends time thinking about his old job and the lawsuit.

"It was rewarding in some ways,” he says. “I can say that, because we won. If we had lost, I don't know what we would have done."