Opinion ID: 167100
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Pretext in RIF itself

Text: 35 Pippin says the RIF itself was pretextual because Burlington hired four new college recruits in the summer of 2000, just a few months after the April RIF, and made two other under-forty engineer hires in an eighteen-month period surrounding the RIF. Pippin says this eliminates the concept of RIF and poses a glaring contradiction in that, in the face of a RIF, Burlington actually hired new engineers. 36 Burlington, however, presented evidence that the offers to these college hires had been extended in November 1999, before any talk of a RIF was in the wind, and that Burlington decided to honor those [offers] and hire those people, because we did not want our reputation as a company to be destroyed on those campuses of which those individuals went to school. 37 As for the two under-forty hires in the eighteen-month period surrounding the April 2000 RIF, Pippin has provided no details about their qualifications or what job functions they assumed, which makes a comparison to Pippin's abilities and treatment nearly impossible. Moreover, at least for the hiring decision made ten months before the RIF, the record is clear that no one at Burlington's San Juan Division knew to anticipate a RIF at that time. The decision to hire a new engineer eight months after a RIF also fails to account for any non-RIF-related terminations or resignations from within the engineer pool, and that decision is fairly remote from the RIF decision. 38 Pippin has presented no evidence, other than his own opinions of how a business should be run, to refute these otherwise legitimate considerations. Indeed, our cases have previously held that leaving out new employees from RIF decisions does not establish pretext. See Fallis v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 944 F.2d 743, 745 (10th Cir. 1991).
39 Next, Pippin argues that his replacement by Goodwin, a younger engineer, also eliminates the concept of a RIF. 40 Where an employee is selected for RIF termination solely on the basis of position elimination, qualifications become irrelevant and one way that employee can show pretext is to present evidence that his job was not in fact eliminated but instead remained a single, distinct position. Furr v. Seagate Tech., Inc., 82 F.3d 980, 988 (10th Cir.1996); see also Abuan v. Level 3 Commc'ns, Inc., 353 F.3d 1158, 1169 (10th Cir.2003). 41 Here, however, Burlington reduced its overall complement of petroleum engineers based on a combination of past performance and skill set matches. 8 The fact that Pippin's employment duties were assumed by another employee does not establish pretext. Moreover, Burlington established that Goodwin was an exceptional performer, receiving the highest possible rating in both 1999 and 1998. Indeed, Goodwin earned 100 percent of his eligible bonus in 1999 and 120 percent of it in 1998. 42
43 Finally, Pippin argues that, because Burlington's larger restructuring resulted in the elimination of the high-risk exploration projects in the San Juan Basin, and Pippin was not involved in these high-risk projects, any RIF that subsequently included him was pretextual. 44 Burlington responds that it would show poor business judgment to terminate the higher performers just because they were working on a high risk project at the time, where such higher performers could readily shift into remaining job functions. This conforms with the testimony that RIF-terminated employees were selected after reviewing what the organizational needs were and then determining who the best performers were to meet those needs into the future. We see no reason to second-guess these business judgments or to infer that Burlington's RIF itself was pretextual. 45