Supreme Court to Old People: Quit Your Job, Go Home and Die

That's the basic undercurrent of the majority opinion in Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc. In an opinion written by Justice Clarence "I've Got Mine, Fuck You" Thomas, the Supremes threw out the use of "mixed-motive" proof that is used in every other type of employment discrimination case. Justice Stevens, in his dissent, accurately characterized the majority opinion as "unabashed judicial lawmaking."

In the view of the "hooray for the powerful, screw everyone else" wing of the Court, a litigant who claims that he or she was discriminated against because of age has to prove that "but for" that person's age, they wouldn't have been fired. Which is just bullshit. What the "fuck the workers" side of the Court just did was to hand a recipe card to every employer who wants to fire their old folks. All they have to do is engage in "papering the file"; they have to put a disciplinary note in the file of the oldsters they want to terminate and then, when there is enough paper, just fire them.

Companies do this all the time already. You might have noticed that at companies which vest their employees for pension purposes, people tend to get fired a couple of months prior to their vesting. Or you might see a case where a supervisor is fired because their position "is no longer necessary", but in three months, surprise, surprise, surprise, the company finds out that that position is necessary and they fill it with someone who is 15 to 25 years younger and who does the job for $20,000 less.

Congress needs to fix this, now, just as they did for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.