holding that an employer’s statement about an employee’s age making him eligible for retirement “simply recognized a fact concerning [the employee’s] seniority, an observation which did not imply seniority was the reason for discharge”
How later courts described this case
- holding that an employer’s statement about an employee’s age making him eligible for retirement “simply recognized a fact concerning [the employee’s] seniority, an observation which did not imply seniority was the reason for discharge”
- finding statistical evidence to be insufficient when plaintiff submitted a list of terminated employees “without explanation or evidence . . . that they are in substantially the same position as [plaintiff].”
- rejecting the EEOC’s argument that the district court should not have “discounted each of its type of evidence and ignored that, taken together, all of the agency’s evidence bespoke pretext sufficiently to warrant a jury trial” and instead opining that “‘[e]vidence’ that does not imply pretext taken alone does not do so when cumulated”
- ruling that in a reduction in force, if the employee can show that he was terminated in favor of a “younger, clearly less qualified” individual, a material fact issue exists
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
KING, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
I concur in the judgment affirming the grant of summary judgment for the defendant. In my view, there is insufficient evidence that the nondiseriminatory reasons proffered by TI for the layoffs at issue here were not the real reasons for those layoffs to send the case to the jury.
I do not understand the panel majority to be holding that, in the context of a reduction in force, a showing that a discharged employee was clearly better qualified than younger, retained employees is necessary to create a genuine issue of material fact. See EEOC v. Manville Sales Corp., 27 F.3d 1089 , 1096 n. 5 (5th Cir.1994).
I am not comfortable with the treatment in the majority opinion of the plaintiffs evidence of age-based comments. But even if we accord those comments some probative value, they do not, either independently or in conjunction with the other evidence in the case, constitute more than the scintilla referred to in Boeing.