Lunch at the Labs

AT&T EEOC Suit.

Last Friday (July 26, 2002) Dow Jones Business News reported that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against AT&T's Florham Park, NJ facility. I saw the story at Yahoo! Finance. The article mentions complaints by two prospective employees who claim they were denied employment because of their age.

I find this particularly interesting in light of my (only partially successful) attempts to find out the age statistics of those in my job universe who were layed off in March versus those who were retained. I and others were put in separate "universes" of just one and thus (in effect) were given no age statistics at all. Although I do not have hard evidence, my guess is the March layoffs at AT& Labs were done in a two step process:

• First, people who happened to be working on matters that were no longer essential to a stripped down and troubled AT&T were let go.
• Second, older people who were working on projects that were retained, but who have higher salaries and higher pension costs, were let go.

As the oldest person with the greatest number of years of service working on Natural Voices, one of the most successful projects in AT& Labs, I fell into the second category. The only question in my mind is are there enough young people in the first category to cover up the age discrimination in the second category, statistically speaking.

Posted by mjm at July 29, 2002 12:54 PM