Opinion ID: 2994594
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Legal Standards for Proof

Text: The Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on the legal standards a plaintiff must meet in order to prove a case of age discrimination appears in Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc., 120 S. Ct. 2097 (2000). In Reeves, the Court began by reiterating that in such cases, liability depends on whether the protected trait (under the ADEA, age) actually motivated the employer’s decision. Id. at 2105, quoting Hazen Paper Co. v. Biggins, 507 U.S. 604, 610 (1993). That is, it continued, the plaintiff’s age must have actually played a role in [the employer’s decisionmaking] process and had a determinative influence on the outcome. 120 S. Ct. at 2105, quoting Hazen Paper at 610 (bracketed text in Reeves). Like our case, Reeves dealt with a claim of disparate treatment on account of age. In addition to those claims, our case also involves claims of an unlawful pattern or practice of discriminating on the basis of age, which, as the Supreme Court observed in International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324 (1977), is another theory of intentional discrimination, under which the plaintiff bears the burden of showing by a preponderance of the evidence that [age] discrimination was the company’s standard operating procedure--the regular rather than the unusual practice. Id. at 336. Courts have sometimes struggled with the proper way to apply these different approaches to reduction-in-force, or RIF, cases. They note the obvious point that adverse actions, in the form of job loss, are inevitable for some people in RIF situations, and that the corporation is taking the action for general efficiency reasons. We have explained on several occasions, however, that the fundamental analysis of RIF cases is no different from the analysis appropriate to other forms of discrimination. See, e.g., Thorn v. Sundstrand Aerospace Corp., 207 F.3d 383, 386 (7th Cir. 2000); Bellaver v. Quanex Corp., 200 F.3d 485, 493-94 (7th Cir. 2000). In Bellaver, we acknowledged that it makes no sense in a RIF case to require the plaintiff to show that the job remained open. Instead, the plaintiff must show that the employer carried out the RIF in a discriminatory way. 200 F.3d at 494. Conceptually, one can think of a RIF as a situation (not unlike zero-based budgeting) in which the employer decides whom from a defined group it will re-hire or retain, considering all existing employees as roughly like applicants for retention. See Matthews v. Commonwealth Edison Co., 128 F.3d 1194, 1195 (7th Cir. 1997). Discriminatory hiring practices have been analyzed for years under the various frameworks we have described, and RIFs do not require anything significantly different.