WICHITA, Kan. — A federal appeals court ruled Monday that former employees of The Boeing Co. failed to demonstrate a pattern of age discrimination in the wake of the 2005 sale of its commercial aircraft business in Kansas and Oklahoma.
Ninety former Boeing workers sued in December 2005 claiming they lost their jobs because of their age when the Chicago-based aerospace manufacturer sold operations in Wichita, Tulsa, Okla., and McAlester, Okla., to Onex Corp.
Onex formed Wichita-based Spirit AeroSystems to handle the business. Their lawsuit was granted conditional class-action status in 2006 under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed Monday with the 2010 decision of U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren, summarily siding in favor of the aerospace giants. Melgren found there was too little evidence to put the case before a jury.
“Although the Employees have provided evidence that discrimination occurred during Boeing’s divestiture of the Division, we agree with the district court that the Employees cannot prove a pattern or practice of age discrimination,” the appeals court wrote.
The appeals court said while older employees “fared slightly worse” than younger ones, they had failed to show the companies’ hiring practices unfairly hurt older workers. It also agreed with the lower court’s finding that the ex-employees failed to show the companies intended to interfere with their pension benefits. The companies had argued they expected Spirit would save money by paying its workers less and employing fewer of them. Its labor contracts provided wages higher than the market required in Wichita, Tulsa and McAlester, and it believed a new company would be able to negotiate less costly labor contracts, according to the filing.
Its labor costs were also high because of the age of its workforce after seniority-based layoffs in the early 2000s eliminated many younger employees. The plaintiffs argued the companies planned to cut costs by getting rid of older, more expensive workers. But the appeals court found that the former employees cannot prove that such a scheme existed.
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