Supreme Court Eases Age Suit Rules

The ruling could affect an estimated 75 million middle-aged and older workers?roughly half the workforce in the country.

In the majority ruling, Justice Stevens cited the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act, which he noted contained much of the same language used three years earlier in the Civil Rights Act.

Since the Civil Rights Act allowed for the filing of "disparate impact" claims, which focus on the result of a policy rather than whether or not it was intended to be unfair to a particular group, the court found that the ADEA law should apply to such claims as well.

"In determining whether the ADEA authorizes disparate-impact claims, we begin with the premise that when Congress uses the same language in two statutes having similar purposes, particularly when one is enacted shortly after the other, it is appropriate to presume that Congress intended that text to have the same meaning in both statutes," Justice Stevens wrote.

However, while the Court's ruling makes it easier to file a discrimination complaint, it still maintains the standards for proving discrimination. Employers, the court said, could engage in practices that result in a detrimental effect on older workers if those practices were instituted based on reasonable factors other than age.

In the case at issue, Smith vs. the City of Jackson, 30 older officers with the Jackson Police force filed suit alleging that a new pay plan provided greater raises to younger workers.

Although the Court agreed that the plan appeared to favor younger officers, it ruled in favor of the city because the new pay plan was enacted for reasons unrelated to age, in this case bringing officers' salaries more in line with those of others in the region.

The officers "have done little more than point out that the pay plan at issue is relatively less generous to older workers than to younger workers," the court said. "They have not identified any specific test, requirement or practice within the pay plan that has an adverse impact on older workers."

Citing an earlier case, the court maintained that "it is not enough to simply allege that there is a disparate impact on workers, or point to a generalized policy that leads to such an impact."

Justice Antonin Scalia provided the fifth vote for the "disparate impact" ruling, although he said in a concurrent opinion that he came to his conclusion by deferring to a federal agency's ruling that the ADEA allowed disparate impact claims.

Although agreeing with the court's ruling against the officers, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor disputed the court's allowance of disparate income claims.

"In the nearly four decades since the ADEA's enactment," she wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy, "we have never read the statute to impose liability upon an employer without proof of discriminatory intent. I decline to join the Court in doing so today."