3 Lawsuits That Could Stop Age Discrimination

Can you be fired because of your health insurance costs?

In 2013, Spirit AeroSystems — a company in Wichita, Kan., that makes parts for airplanes — laid off 360 employees. Twenty-four of those workers have filed an age discrimination lawsuit, arguing that the company manipulated their job-performance evaluations and subsequently fired them based on their age and to avoid having to pay the potentially expensive costs of their health insurance. Many more have joined the lawsuit.

According to the suit, prior to the layoffs, the company identified employees (and their family members) whose health care expenses made them “high-cost claimants.” Many of the conditions that put employees into this category were illnesses more common among older Americans, such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer.

“The suspicious part is that right before Spirit conducted the reduction in force, they went self-funded for their health care benefits,” says McCann. (AARP is corepresenting the plaintiffs in this lawsuit.) The switch to the self-funded model means Spirit takes on full liability for paying the employee’s share of medical claims covered by the company’s health insurance. Costly illnesses for employees would become a major expense for the company. Many other employers avoid such risks by paying the insurer a regular fee.

“Reductions in force are never easy, however, all decisions are based on job-related, nondiscriminatory criteria,” Spirit said in a statement. “We are confident the evidence in this case will show Spirit is compliant with the law in its employment practices.”

The lawsuit currently is in the discovery phase.

Is age discrimination common in Silicon Valley?

For years, older workers have said the tech companies of Silicon Valley prize youth over experience when hiring employees. A growing class action suit against Google could go a long way toward proving whether that criticism is accurate.

Cheryl Fillekes, a systems engineer who applied unsuccessfully for four different jobs at Google between 2007 and 2014, filed the lawsuit in 2015. She says that one Google recruiter even told her to put her graduation dates on her resume “so the interviewers [could] see how old [she was].” Fillekes’ complaint also points out that the median age for Google’s workforce is 29, compared with 42.8 years for computer programmers and 41.7 years for computer-hardware engineers nationally.
 
At least 269 plaintiffs have signed on to the case.

Google has denied the allegations, stating that it has strong antidiscrimination policies. The case is currently in the discovery process, with Google seeking to gather more information about some of the claimants who recently joined the suit.