Recruitment and selection law for local government employers - Page 91 |
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Chapter 2: Discrimination Law in the Recruitment and Selection Context | 75
2.2.1.4 Maximum Age Restrictions and the Public Employer: A Hypothetical
Maximum age requirements for positions other than public safety are likely to raise issues under the ADEA, as the following hypothetical shows:
The city of Paradise, North Carolina, is reviewing its job descriptions for three positions: police officer, driver for the city’s transit authority, and accountant. It is the firm opinion of the county manager that a person’s cognitive and physical abilities begin to decline once he or she reaches age 55 and that a mandatory retirement age of 55 is therefore appropriate for some positions. In the case of law enforcement personnel, the manager believes that officers over the age of 55 can neither run as fast as they must to apprehend suspects nor respond to threats as quickly as they once did, because their reflexes have slowed. He also thinks that bus drivers need the quicker reflexes of the young to avoid dangerous traffic situations. As for accountants, last year the county suffered an embarrassing financial loss directly traceable to the fact that the previous accountant, a woman of 60, disliked wearing the reading glasses her age-related vision problems required and misread and incorrectly entered financial data into the county’s financial system. In the meantime, the city’s human resources director has received an inquiry about a transit driver position from a 57-year-old woman who recently relocated from Chicago, where she had 25 years’ experience driving buses for that city. What should the human
which adoption of a mandatory retirement age might be construed to be a subterfuge: (1) where the employer adopts a mandatory age limit to retaliate against an employee who had previously protested practices in violation of the ADEA, or (2) where the employer adopted age limits for law enforcement and firefighters at the same time that it created new, lower-paying positions and allowed the newly retired officers to apply for them, giving rise to the inference that it was seeking a way around age-based pay discrimination. See Correa-Ruiz, 573 F.2d at 14; Kannady, 590 F.3d at 1173 (rejecting argument that law enforcement retirement system is subterfuge because it was enacted to increase revenues in state pension fund and finding that plaintiff failed to identify a non-hiring substantive provision of the ADEA that the retirement system was designed to evade); Feldman, 434 F.3d at 183–84 (rejecting argument that age restrictions in law enforcement that are based on economic rationales are subterfuges to evade the ADEA); Minch v. City of Chicago, 363 F.3d 615, 624–25, 628–29, 630 (7th Cir. 2004) (plaintiffs offered no proof of subterfuge, only proof that city’s officials thought that persons over age 63 were too old to be effective in public safety).
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| Title | Recruitment and selection law for local government employers - Page 91 |
| Full Text | Chapter 2: Discrimination Law in the Recruitment and Selection Context | 75 2.2.1.4 Maximum Age Restrictions and the Public Employer: A Hypothetical Maximum age requirements for positions other than public safety are likely to raise issues under the ADEA, as the following hypothetical shows: The city of Paradise, North Carolina, is reviewing its job descriptions for three positions: police officer, driver for the city’s transit authority, and accountant. It is the firm opinion of the county manager that a person’s cognitive and physical abilities begin to decline once he or she reaches age 55 and that a mandatory retirement age of 55 is therefore appropriate for some positions. In the case of law enforcement personnel, the manager believes that officers over the age of 55 can neither run as fast as they must to apprehend suspects nor respond to threats as quickly as they once did, because their reflexes have slowed. He also thinks that bus drivers need the quicker reflexes of the young to avoid dangerous traffic situations. As for accountants, last year the county suffered an embarrassing financial loss directly traceable to the fact that the previous accountant, a woman of 60, disliked wearing the reading glasses her age-related vision problems required and misread and incorrectly entered financial data into the county’s financial system. In the meantime, the city’s human resources director has received an inquiry about a transit driver position from a 57-year-old woman who recently relocated from Chicago, where she had 25 years’ experience driving buses for that city. What should the human which adoption of a mandatory retirement age might be construed to be a subterfuge: (1) where the employer adopts a mandatory age limit to retaliate against an employee who had previously protested practices in violation of the ADEA, or (2) where the employer adopted age limits for law enforcement and firefighters at the same time that it created new, lower-paying positions and allowed the newly retired officers to apply for them, giving rise to the inference that it was seeking a way around age-based pay discrimination. See Correa-Ruiz, 573 F.2d at 14; Kannady, 590 F.3d at 1173 (rejecting argument that law enforcement retirement system is subterfuge because it was enacted to increase revenues in state pension fund and finding that plaintiff failed to identify a non-hiring substantive provision of the ADEA that the retirement system was designed to evade); Feldman, 434 F.3d at 183–84 (rejecting argument that age restrictions in law enforcement that are based on economic rationales are subterfuges to evade the ADEA); Minch v. City of Chicago, 363 F.3d 615, 624–25, 628–29, 630 (7th Cir. 2004) (plaintiffs offered no proof of subterfuge, only proof that city’s officials thought that persons over age 63 were too old to be effective in public safety). |
