So if I have this right, it doesn't matter that a company didn't intend discrimination...people can still sue over discrimination? Wha?
Believe it or not, Scalia agrees with this decision but O'Connon does not.
Don't worry, you can't be fired because of your age.
BUT, you CAN be "removed from your misery", in a painless, beautiful manner. Just head for Florida. . .
Suppose that you worked in an office for, say, a company that wanted to project a youthful image, so all the "older" workers were sequestered in the back of the building, where visitors wouldn't see them.
But the company doesn't MEAN to discriminate!
So when promotion and raise time comes around, who does the boss think of first?
The ones he sees first?
Does this sound fair to you? If so, I think there's probably a nice Mid Eastern country where you'd be every happy.
It's called disparate impact, and has been used for years to prove discrimination with regard to sex and race - this just rightly expands it to age. Let me give you an (admittedly out-there) example. A hotel owner is tired of long hair clogging up his maid's vacuums, so he decides to no longer rent rooms to people with long hair. However, women are much more likely to have long hair than men. Even though he is not intending to, the hotel owner is discriminating against women.
So what? Americans can sue anyone for any reason. As for the likelyhood of their success on the merits, that's another story.