Articles Tagged with Age discrimination lawyer in Costa Mesa

A number of high-profile disability discrimination lawsuits across the country are an important reminder of the fact that although we have made a great deal of progress in this arena, we still have a far way to go.crosswalk02

Here in California, the Fair Employment Housing Act, enforced by the state’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, bars employment discrimination on the basis of a person’s disability or even a perceived disability.

There are also requirements that hold employers to an expectation that they will reasonably act to accommodate workers with physical or mental disabilities and illnesses such as HIV/AIDS and cancer.  In those cases where an employer fails to do this, the burden of proof is on the employer to show why doing so would cause an undue hardship.

Recently, a veteran newspaper reporter, heralded for her deft and ample coverage of the crime and courts  beat in seedy Southern Florida, was recognized for her skilled fast embrace of new technology, with an editor publicly calling her a “social media star.”newspaper

Little more than a year later, she was offered a “voluntary buyout,” which a thinly veiled attempt by a company to shed older (i.e., more expensive) workers. Our age discrimination lawyers in Costa Mesa believe that this approach is not only discriminatory, it’s short-sighted, as it ends up reducing the overall quality of the finished product.

Still, such buy-outs are not technically illegal, even if they do blatantly target the over-55 crowd (every single one of the 40 employees at the paper offered the buyout was over the age of 55). Administrators can get around it by making it “voluntary.” The publisher reportedly told the employees in explaining the deal that, “surely, many of you have contemplated retirement and, if not, could probably use the skills honed during decades in the news business to land other jobs.”

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