Dive Brief:
- A former employee of energy company Southern Company Services accused the company of discriminating against him based on his age and interfering with his Family and Medical Leave Act leave after it fired him one day after his leave was approved and less than one month after he turned 60, according to a complaint filed Thursday (Johnson v. Southern Services Co., Inc.).
- The worker, a senior vendor manager, alleged a supervisor had regularly made ageist and ableist comments to his own supervisor, including that SCS had “too many people over 60” and that those over 60 “get sick.” After returning from a month of FMLA leave and requesting intermittent leave for his anxiety, the worker was fired, per his complaint.
- Terminations that happen close in time to protected activity — or to events like landmark birthdays — can often appear as red flags to courts. In 2023, for example, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court revived a retaliation case against the Texas city of Granbury after it fired a worker minutes after she didn’t show up for work after exhausting FMLA leave.
Dive Insight:
Beyond allegations of repeated comments that pointed toward age and disability bias, one throughline in the worker’s complaint was the alleged failure of human resources to respond to his — or his supervisor’s — concerns.
The worker’s supervisor allegedly reported the ageist comments to HR, for example, but “nothing was done,” court documents said. Later, after his supervisor retired and he received a new one, he underwent a performance review that “falsely accused him of poor performance.” Because the supervisor was new, the review primarily came from the biased superior, according to the complaint. He later allegedly received a “baseless” disciplinary action from the same person.
The worker reached out to HR and said he believed he would lose his job at the end of the year, when he turned 60. It is not clear from the complaint whether he received any response, and due to the alleged lack of response his first supervisor received, he “believed that filing his own complaint would only hasten his termination.”
When he sought intermittent leave and Americans with Disabilities Act forms to provide his doctor, SCS’s third-party leave administrator allegedly never sent the forms.
SCS declined to comment on the lawsuit.
HR inaction can be a primary motivation — and source of evidence — for employee lawsuits. In a 2024 lawsuit, for example, a worker alleged that the Surgery Center of New England’s HR department failed to investigate reports that two male workers took inappropriate photos of a female X-ray technician. And in a more recent case, a staffer sued The Ohio State University, claiming HR did not properly investigate his harassment complaint against a female employee because he is male. The second case is ongoing, and HR Dive was unable to find updates on the first lawsuit.
When HR departments fail to act, the consequences can be harmful to the department’s reputation in the long term. Nearly half of respondents to an iHire survey on toxic workplaces said they didn’t trust HR or leadership to help in circumstances of toxic behavior, and more than a third said they feared retaliation.
