Legislation Introduced to Protect Older Workers from Employment Discrimination
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the senior Democratic member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, introduced legislation today that restores vital civil rights protections for older workers in the face of the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gross v. FBL Financial. Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) also introduced similar legislation in the Senate today.
“As we have seen a number of times over the last few years, the Supreme Court overturned years of precedence and Congressional intent to rewrite the rules of the road in favor of the powerful,” said Rep. Miller. “Just as the court majority threw up new roadblocks to women proving pay discrimination in Ledbetter, they have added absurd hurdles for older workers to proving age discrimination in Gross. And just like we did with Ledbetter, Congress can and must overturn this rollback of civil rights. Especially in the wake of the Great Recession, with older workers having suffered bouts of unemployment and now seeking to rebuild careers and retirement security, we should be doing all we can to make sure every American is treated fairly as they seek reemployment, career advancement, or fair compensation on the job.”
The Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act reverses the Gross decision and restores the law to what it was for decades before the Supreme Court rewrote the rule. The bill makes clear that once a victim shows discrimination was a “motivating factor” behind a decision, the burden is properly on the employer to show it complied with the law.
In Gross, the Supreme Court rewrote civil rights laws by overturning well-established precedent and making it harder for workers facing age discrimination to enforce their rights. The court ruled that it is no longer enough for a victim of discrimination to prove that age was a motivating factor in an adverse employment decision. An employee must now prove upfront that age not only played a role in the employer’s decision but was the decisive factor in the decision-making – a difficult and often impossible proof to make when it comes to another person’s interior motives.
The court’s opinion has had reverberations in a wide range of civil rights cases beyond age discrimination. Most recently, in University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Supreme Court applied this new burden of proof to retaliation cases, where employers are alleged to have retaliated against employees who have complained of discrimination on the job. The bill would effectively overturn Nassar as well, restoring protections for victims of retaliation.
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