Discrimination Based on Age. The United Auto Workers (UAW) is the union that repre-sents the employees of General Dynamics Land Systems, Inc In 1997, a collective bargaining agreement between UAW and General Dynamics eliminated the company's obligation

Question

to pro-vide health insurance to employees who retired after the date of the agreement, except for cur-rent workers at least fifty years old. Dennis Cline and 194 other employees over the age of forty but under fifty, objected to this term. They complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming that the agreement violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967. The ADEA forbids discriminatory preference for the "young" over the "old." Does the ADEA also prohibit favoring the old over the young? How should the court rule? Ex-plain.

Answer 1

Discrimination based on age
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agreed with the employees, and invited General Dynamics and United Auto Workers (UAW) to settle informally with Cline and the other employees. When they failed, Cline and the others filed a suit in a federal district court against General Dynamics. The court dismissed the suit, and the plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which reversed. General Dynamics appealed to the United States Supreme Court, which reinstated the dismissal, holding that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) does not prohibit favoring the old over the young. The Supreme Court cited the ADEA's "text, structure, purpose, and history." The history "reflects the common facts that an individual's chances to find and keep a job get worse over time; as between any two people, the younger is in the stronger position, the older more apt to be tagged with demeaning stereotype. * * * [I]n a world where younger is better, talk about discrimination because of age is naturally understood to refer to discrimination against the older." This "same, idiomatic sense" of the ADEA "is confirmed by the statute's restriction of the protected class to those 40 and above. If Congress had been worrying about protecting the younger against the older, it would not likely have ignored everyone under 40."