Dive Brief:
- Baltimore County has agreed to pay $5.4 million to more than 2,000 employees to settle a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit alleging it violated the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) by charging older employees higher rates for pension benefits than younger members.
- Contributions to the county's defined benefit pension plan were based on age at the time of entry into the retirement system, according to an EEOC news release.
- "Only the EEOC can sue state and local governments under the ADEA, and thus this violation would have gone without remedy absent the EEOC's lawsuit. The case also confirmed the important principle that back pay is a mandatory legal remedy under the ADEA," EEOC Assistant General Counsel Christopher Lage said. The case has been on the agency's docket for 13 years.
Dive Insights:
Under the ADEA, employers are not allowed to discriminate against any person who is 40 years old or older because of that person's age — a prohibition that applies to the employee's "compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment" and includes employee benefits, EEOC says in guidance.
Challenging discrimination in retirement benefits has evidently been a commission priority for quite some time. In a 2014 EEOC news release on an earlier court decision in the same lawsuit, the commission noted that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' rejection of Baltimore County's appeal was the latest in a series of "systemic discrimination suits the EEOC has brought against public employers alleging age discrimination in the provision of retirement benefits."
More broadly, age discrimination is widespread, tolerated and seen as the "last acceptable bias," according to a December 2019 report from AARP. Large employers are particularly guilty of ageism, the report said, as they tolerate the bias because laws that protect older workers are "decidedly weaker" than those banning other types of discrimination.