A bad economy has meant more numbers of people being laid off work, and unfortunately, turning their guns on their employers. The Equal Employment Commission has reported a substantial increase in age discrimination claims filed in 2009. In fact, the number of age discrimination claims last year reached a 10-year high. The good news is that very few of these lawsuits have resulted in multi-million-dollar payouts. In fact, juries are very likely to consist of people who have probably been laid off over the past year or so. They may have a lot of sympathy for a plaintiff who has also lost his job, but are less likely to want him to receive tons of money for his experience.
That doesn’t mean that employers can breathe easy, however. Earlier this year, a California Supreme Court handed a former Google employee a huge victory by siding with him in an age bias lawsuit against Google. The employee, a 52-year-old man alleged in his lawsuit that Google employees called him disparaging names. like “fuddy-duddy,” and made jokes about his age. These stray remarks should ordinarily not have been considered in court, under the “stray remarks” doctrine. This means that remarks made in passing by colleagues, coworkers or even an employer, which have no impact on the actual decision-making process of the company, cannot be considered during an age discrimination lawsuit. However, the California Supreme Court made an exception here, and considered remarks that had been made in passing by the Google employee’s colleagues.
Obviously, that’s dangerous for employers, because it opens the gates for courts to use stray remarks made by you or coworkers about an employee, in court.
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