Court Opinion

ID: 9701907
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 22:42:52.005883+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:09:50.513124
License: Public Domain

SWYGERT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Regrettably, I am compelled to dissent. Murgia and Vance are, in my opinion, pointedly distinguishable from the case before us and ought not control our decision. Both cases dealt with a distinct group of Government employees whose peculiar job requirements justified compulsory retirement at an age earlier than civil service workers generally. Here the Wisconsin statute makes no distinction among the state employees even though they may have positions in which age may or may not be a factor. It is an across-the-board statute. This, I believe, makes for a meaningful distinction; neither Murgia nor Vance addressed the question whether a compulsory retirement statute for all State employees who reach 65 years old can be rationally based.
The Wisconsin statute was enacted in its present basic form in 1947. It may well be that a rational basis serving legitimate state purposes could be constructed—in hindsight—for compulsory retirement at 65 years old in 1947. But this is 1979, and the world has moved ahead from 1947. For example, Congress amended the Federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 in 1977, raising the ceiling for application of that statute’s antidiscriminatory prohibitions from 65 to 70 years of age. See 29 U.S.C. §§ 621 et seq.1 The Senate Report accompanying those amendments provides eloquent and persuasive evidence of the fact that a general compulsory retirement law at age 65 presently can serve no legitimate state purpose:
The act’s current age limitation unfairly assumes that age alone provides an accurate measure of an individual’s ability to perform work. In fact, the evidence clearly establishes the continued productivity of workers who are 65 years of age and older. First, there were 2.7 million persons age 65 and older working in 1976. 1.6 million of them are 65 to 69 years of age and 1.1 million of them are age 70 and older. There are individuals who work into their eighties and even nineties. Second, there is substantial evidence that many workers can continue to work effectively beyond age 65 and may, in fact, be better employees because of experience and job commitment.
S. Rep. No. 493, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. 3 (1977).
The rational basis for a law may dissipate over time. That is the situation here. This is exemplified by the current practice of selectively exempting certain Wisconsin state employees from the requirement to retire at age 65 2 Aside from its unequal treatment implications, this practice fatally undermines the hypothetical purposes (purposes which were never articulated by the Wisconsin legislature itself) advanced by the Attorney General for the statute.
I would hold that the Wisconsin statute violates the Fourteenth Amendment.

. Federal employees covered by the Civil Service Retirement system have no mandatory retirement age. See Age Discrimination in Employment Act Amendments of 1978, Pub. L. No. 95-256, § 5(c), 92 Stat. 191.

. The affidavit of John L. Zimbeck, Deputy Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Employees Trust Funds, reads in part:
There are some employees who do not retire until after the normal retirement age because their employment may be continued by the state agency that employs them. Attached hereto and marked Exhibit B are statistics which reflect the age of publicly employed persons participating in the Wisconsin Retirement Fund. As of March 13, 1978, 261 men and 219 women over age 65 were continued as public employees and as contributors to the Wisconsin Retirement Fund. A regular public employee who works beyond the age of 65 receives a pension increase for each year that he works beyond age 65.