Fired 5 weeks before vesting in benefits – handwritten notes sealed employer's fate
A federal court has upheld a jury's finding that agency leadership targeted older workers for extra scrutiny before firing a 61-year-old bureau chief.
The decision in White v. District of Columbia, issued January 8 by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, came after Patrice White successfully convinced a jury that age discrimination drove her termination from the city's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.
White had worked at the agency for 33 years, earning promotions along the way until she became chief of the resilience bureau. Then, just five weeks before her 62nd birthday, when she would have vested in retirement benefits, she was fired.
What sealed the case for the jury was testimony from another bureau chief who described how senior leadership had made clear that older employees needed watching. People who were older were "less valued," he testified, and there was an understanding that "some of the older black female employees" should be given "a little bit more scrutiny" in their performance reviews.
The direction, he said, came straight from the executive office and leadership team. There was a "feeling of folks in the agency of wanting to go younger."
But the scrutiny was only part of the story. Before White was fired, senior leadership made repeated attempts to nudge her toward early retirement. The same bureau chief testified that he overheard...
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