Court Opinion

ID: 9488862
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:57:44.716606+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:08.994942
License: Public Domain

LTJTTIG, Circuit Judge,
concurring in the judgment:
I believe that section 510 of ERISA, 29 U.S.C. § 1140, protects employees only against discriminatory actions that substantially affect the employment relationship, as virtually every court of appeals to consider the scope of this provision has concluded, see, e.g., Haberern v. Kaupp Vascular Surgeons Plan, 24 F.3d 1491, 1502-06 (3d Cir.1994); Deeming v. American Standard Inc., 905 F.2d 1124, 1126-28 (7th Cir.1990); West v. Butler, 621 F.2d 240, 245-46 (6th Cir.1980), and that the cessation of wholly gratuitous benefits is not action that properly may be understood as affecting the employer-employee relationship. This belief, together with the fact that section 510 is modeled after section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, 29 U.S.C. § 158(a)(3), which itself does not prohibit discrimination in gratuities, are sufficient in my mind to justify the majority’s holding that section 510 should not be extended to protect against discrimination with respect to benefits that are wholly gratuitous. For these reasons, I concur in the court’s judgment.
I ascribe no particular significance to the fact that section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act includes, but section 510 of ERISA omits, the language “term or condition of employment.” It is evident that section 510 was “modeled” after section 8(a)(3) not in the sense that the actual language was imported into section 510, but rather, only in the sense that Congress wished to achieve in section 510 that which it had achieved in section 8(a)(3), namely, the protection of employees against employer retaliation for the exercise of protected rights. Indeed, virtually none of the language used in section 8(a)(3) is actually used in section 510. Thus, this is not the typical circumstance where Congress actually repeated the identical language from an extant statute in order that the subsequently-enacted statute would be identically interpreted, in which event the omission of particular language in the later statute might well be suggestive of a different intent. Here, any negative implication from the absence of any particular language in one of these provisions, and the inclusion of that language in the other, is simply unwarranted.