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Nature of Suit Code: 442
Nature of Suit: Civil Rights Employment
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued January 18, 2005 Decided February 25, 2005

No. 03-7153

RICHARD LAW, ET AL.,

APPELLANTS

v.

CONTINENTAL AIRLINES CORPORATION, INC.,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 01cv01711)

Daniel S. Kozma argued the cause and filed the briefs for

appellants.

Jon A. Geier argued the cause and filed the brief for

appellee.

Before: GINSBURG, Chief Judge, and GARLAND, Circuit

Judge, and WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge.

Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS.

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WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: Continental Airlines

generally promotes its pilots based on seniority. The Federal

Aviation Administration’s Age 60 Rule, however, bars airlines

from employing pilots aged 60 years or older. 14

C.F.R. § 121.383(c). Because training to pilot new aircraft may

take months, an airline might find itself training a pilot at

considerable expense who would have little or no opportunity to

use the acquired skills flying the airline’s planes. To avoid that,

Continental negotiated with its pilots union not to promote pilots

aged 58 or older to positions requiring new training, but to give

those pilots “pay protection”—the salary they would have

earned on promotion. Under the resulting provision, 1998

Collective Bargaining Agreement (“CBA”) § 9(3)(K)(2),

Continental would “pay protect[]” a pilot aged 58 or older not

accepted for promotion from the day the junior pilot who was

awarded the slot assumed his new position after training. 

Plaintiffs, three retired pilots not accepted for promotion at

age 58 and thus covered by § 9(3)(K)(2), contrast that provision

with another section of the CBA, § 3(12)(B), which gives pay

protection to a pilot who is accepted for promotion but is

leapfrogged by a junior pilot, starting from the day the junior

pilot begins training. Plaintiffs brought an “opt-in” class action

suit against Continental, requesting accelerated pay protection

akin to that of § 3 rather than delayed pay protection under § 9.

The district court deemed their claims time-barred and granted

Continental’s motion for summary judgment. We affirm. 

* * *

Viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the

relevant facts are as follows. Plaintiffs Law, Davis, and

Krichbaum bid for captaincies that Continental made available

in May 1999. Continental awarded the captaincies two months

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later, selecting junior pilots because plaintiffs would retire fewer

than two years after promotion. The junior pilots awarded bids

over Law and Davis began training in September 1999, while

Krichbaum alleges the awarded junior pilot in his case began

training in December 1999. Davis bid unsuccessfully for

another captaincy in January 2000, for which the awarded junior

pilot began training that same month. 

Under § 9(3)(K)(2) of the CBA, “[a] pilot . . . 58 years old

or older on the effective date of a system staffing will not be

awarded a higher status . . . but will be pay protected . . . on the

effective date of the bid.” (emphasis added). The bid’s effective

date is the date the junior pilot formally assumes his new

position after completing training. Pursuant to § 9, Continental

pay protected plaintiffs for the May 1999 openings beginning in

June 2000, and pay protected Davis for the January 2000

opening beginning in January 2001. By contrast, a pilot

accepted for promotion and covered by § 3(12)(B) “will be pay

protected when a junior pilot is advanced to his new sub-base

and status before a more senior pilot is advanced to the same

sub-base and status on the same system staffing award.”

(emphasis added). Advancement to a new sub-base corresponds

to the first day of pre-promotion training. Continental and the

union eventually revised § 9 to match the timetable of § 3, but

too late—December 2000—to apply to plaintiffs. Letter of

Agreement 12.

On learning that Continental, in response to 1996

grievances, had pay protected two 58-year-old pilots from the

day the promoted junior pilots began training, Law and Davis

filed grievances, which Continental denied in February 2000.

Law and Davis then filed charges of age discrimination with the

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) in

January 2001 and April 2001, respectively. Krichbaum appears

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to have filed no grievance; he attempted to file a charge at the

EEOC in September 2001, but we are told that the EEOC

rejected the filing because it repeated Law’s charge. Law and

Davis received right to sue letters, and plaintiffs filed a

complaint in the district court in August 2001. 

The court granted Continental’s motion for summary

judgment and dismissed the suit with prejudice. Plaintiffs’

claims were time-barred, the court held, because plaintiffs did

not file EEOC charges within 300 days of Continental’s alleged

discrimination, as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act

(“ADEA”) requires. 29 U.S.C. § 626(d)(2). The court found no

discrimination within the statutory window because the two

relevant sections of the CBA did not treat similarly situated

employees differently. On appeal, we review the district court’s

grant of summary judgment de novo. Apotex, Inc. v. FDA, 393

F.3d 210, 216 (D.C. Cir. 2004). 

* * *

Plaintiffs revised their main argument between briefs.

Compare Appellants’ Brief at 21-24, with Reply Brief at 11-12.

The apparently final version is that “each paycheck within the

300 day limitations period is separately actionable, but those

falling outside of the limitations period are time-barred.” Reply

Brief at 12. Each paycheck under § 9 was discriminatory, they

contend, because § 9 denies pilots 58 years or older the benefits

of § 3’s general rule of accelerated pay protection. Accordingly,

Continental allegedly owes plaintiffs for the months within the

ADEA window during which the awarded junior pilots were

training but had not yet assumed their new captaincies. That

period evidently comprises April and May 2000 for Law, and

June to December 2000 for Davis. EEOC did not accept

Krichbaum’s attempted filing, and nothing in the record in any

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event indicates he is entitled to relief within what would have

been the ADEA window.

Plaintiffs rely principally on Bazemore v. Friday, 478 U.S.

385 (1986), which permitted black agricultural workers to

recover from a state agency for salary discrimination that

predated the violated statute. Id. at 390-91. “Each week’s

paycheck that delivers less to a black than to a similarly situated

white is a wrong actionable under Title VII, regardless [whether]

this pattern was begun prior to the effective date of Title VII.”

Id. at 395-96. Plaintiffs thus view each pay-unprotected

paycheck within the 300-day window as discriminatory and

separately actionable. They concede, in turn, that any deficient

prior paycheck is a “discrete act,” so that claims based on such

acts are time-barred “even when they are related to acts alleged

in timely filed charges.” Nat’l R.R. Passenger Corp. v. Morgan,

536 U.S. 101, 113 (2002); see also id. at 111. 

Continental regards Bazemore as inapt, arguing that the

plaintiffs here were not “similarly situated” to the pilots who

enjoyed § 3 pay protection. Continental also argues that any

discrimination conceivably playing a role in the paycheck

differential must have occurred in the time-barred period when

the plaintiffs were not accepted for promotion. Continental cites

in support Taylor v. FDIC, 132 F.3d 753 (D.C. Cir. 1997), for

the reminder that “an untimely suit cannot be revived by

pointing to effects within the limitations period of unlawful acts

that occurred earlier.” Id. at 765 (internal quotation marks and

citation omitted). “Appellants,” Continental complains,

“attempt to make the consequences of the act (less pay) appear

to be the discriminatory act, rather than the act that caused their

pay to remain at the same level (the bid denial).” Appellee’s

Brief at 34-35 (citing Delaware State College v. Ricks, 449 U.S.

250, 258 (1980)). We agree with Continental’s analysis. 

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According to Morgan, “[e]ach discrete discriminatory act

starts a new clock for filing charges alleging that act.” 536 U.S.

at 113. To call a paycheck a discrete act is simple enough, but

plaintiffs’ claims survive only if the disputed paychecks are

“discriminatory.” This would be true if Continental’s seniority

system were facially discriminatory. “There is no doubt, of

course, that a facially discriminatory seniority system (one that

treats similarly situated employees differently) can be

challenged at any time.” Lorance v. AT&T Technologies, 490

U.S. 900, 912 (1989) (emphasis added). “[T]he normal

definition of discrimination [is] differential treatment of

similarly situated groups.” Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel Zimring, 527

U.S. 581, 613 (1999) (Kennedy, J., concurring). 

Plaintiffs argue the CBA is facially discriminatory because

§ 9 “den[ies] pay protection to pilots each month solely because

of their age.” Appellants’ Brief at 38. This is incorrect. By the

CBA’s terms, pilots enjoying pay protection under § 9 have “not

be[en] awarded a higher status” (emphasis added), whereas

those subject to § 3 have been “awarded” a promotion and will

be “pay protected” until they are “advanced” to the promoted

position. In other words, § 3 applies to a senior pilot who is

awarded promotion and therefore ultimately will advance, and

it bases pay protection not on the senior pilot’s age, but on the

fact that he will be advanced. Plaintiffs instead urge us to read

§ 3 as a “general rule” of accelerated pay protection, Appellants’

Brief at 19, by which they evidently mean a rule extending

accelerated pay protection to pilots who are not accepted for

promotion. But such a reading violates the language of § 3. 

Plaintiffs seek help from Letter of Agreement 12, which

revised § 9 to render covered pilots “pay protected, in

accordance with § 3.” But, assuming the Letter’s admissibility,

its language only confirms that pilots under § 9 were previously

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beyond § 3’s reach. Sections 3 and 9 are therefore not facially

discriminatory, and cannot in themselves render the paychecks

within the 300-day window actionable.

The present case is thus quite distinct from Bazemore and

our own decision in Anderson v. Zubieta, 180 F.3d 329 (D.C.

Cir. 1999). In Bazemore the employing agency had

“perpetuat[ed]” pay discrimination against blacks “after the

[agency] became covered by Title VII.” 478 U.S. at 395. And

in Zubieta the plaintiffs attacked the “continued application” of

a racially discriminatory policy, saying that the “policy currently

‘treats similarly situated employees differently.’” 180 F.3d at

336 (quoting Lorance, 490 U.S. at 912). 

Plaintiffs are thus left with an allegation that Continental

discriminated against them by denying them advancement to

new positions, which would have made them eligible for § 3’s

relatively early pay protection. But that act occurred in the timebarred period, and even if discriminatory, is like plaintiff flight

attendant’s forced resignation because of her marriage in United

Air Lines, Inc. v. Evans, 431 U.S. 553, 554 (1977). Although

the resignation interrupted Evans’s career with United and thus

caused her to enjoy less seniority and lower pay and fringe

benefits when she returned four years later to work for the

airline, her claim that “the seniority system [gave] present effect

to the past illegal act and therefore perpetuate[d] the

consequences of forbidden discrimination” could not render

those differentials currently actionable. Id. at 557-58.

Morgan does, however, contain one caveat that plaintiffs do

not raise. It allows plaintiffs to use “prior acts as background

evidence in support of a timely claim.” Morgan, 536 U.S. at

113. Put another way, a prior act “may constitute relevant

background evidence in a proceeding in which the status of a

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current practice is at issue.” Evans, 431 U.S. at 558. The exact

scope of this caveat is unclear. Whatever the caveat’s precise

reach, such background evidence cannot suffice where plaintiffs

have offered no evidence of discriminatory purpose other than

(at most) the discrete time-barred decision not to advance them.

To decide otherwise would completely undo Morgan’s

insistence that “[e]ach discrete discriminatory act starts a new

clock for filing charges alleging that act.” 536 U.S. at 113. Cf.

Lorance, 490 U.S. at 901-06 (interpreting Title VI’s seniority

provisions to bar claim by female plaintiffs, demoted in an

unbarred period as a result of an earlier, facially neutral

modification of the employer’s seniority system, a modification

plaintiffs alleged had been adopted “in order to protect” male

employees).

The judgment of the district court is 

Affirmed.

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