https://topclassactions.com/lawsuit-settlements/employment-labor/discrimination/hp-hpe-settle-class-action-over-alleged-mass-layoffs-due-to-age-bias-for-18m/
Update:
- HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. agreed to an $18 million settlement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2016 over alleged age discrimination in layoffs.
- The class includes five named plaintiffs and those in California who were over 40 years old at the time of layoffs.
- If the court approves the settlement, participating class members in California would receive at least $15,000, while the average gross award for ADEA plaintiffs and California class members would be $50,279. The named plaintiffs each would receive a $10,000 service award.
- U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila is set to hear the motion to preliminarily approve the settlement at 10 a.m. Oct. 26.
(Aug. 24, 2016)
Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. and HP Inc. have been slapped with an age discrimination class action lawsuit claiming that the tens of thousands of job cuts it has made in the last four years were to intentionally get rid of workers over the age of 40, in order to replace them with younger employees.
In the complaint filed Thursday in the Northern District of California, four former employees say HP violated federal and California anti-discrimination laws in carrying out its 2012 “Workforce Reduction Plan” and by taking other steps to purge older workers.
Plaintiffs Donna J. Forsyth, Sidney L. Staton III, Arun Vatturi and Dan Weiland claim that in recent years the Palo Alto-based tech giant has publicly sought to transform the company from an “old” company into a “younger” operation, and in the process workers over 40 were “significantly more likely” to have their jobs eliminated under the company’s reduction plan.
“This boilerplate explanation was merely a pretext for HP’s policies of overt age discrimination,” the workers said.
HP slashed roughly 30,000 jobs in 2012 under CEO Meg Whitman, and has conducted smaller cuts since then.
According to the HP age discrimination class action lawsuit, Whitman made no secret of her desire to overhaul the workforce with younger people, saying in a televised interview in 2015 that the company wanted “to make sure that we’ve got a labor pyramid with lots of young people coming in right out of college and graduate school and early in their careers.”
In addition to the layoffs, the age discrimination class action lawsuit says HP implemented early phased retirement programs in 2014 and 2015 for employees over 55 to incentivize them to voluntarily quit.
It also reversed its policy of encouraging employees to work from home, putting a burden on workers with families who were located farther away from HP’s offices, the lawsuit alleges.
At the same time, the company rolled out a policy requiring that 75 percent of new hires be recent college graduates or “early career” employees.
This prerequisite was often stated plainly in job postings online, in what the age bias suit characterizes as a “willful” violation of anti-discrimination laws.
“HP has employed various tactics to effectuate its publicly-stated goal of making itself younger,” the complaint alleges. “In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination pursuant to the [workforce reduction plans] and then systematically replacing them with younger employees.”
The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against HP’s alleged discriminatory practices and restoring all members of the class action lawsuit to comparable positions from which they were terminated or compensation of pay and benefits for the period remaining until each person’s retirement age.
The age discrimination lawsuit does not specify an exact amount of damages.
The workers are represented by Jennie Lee Anderson of Andrus Anderson LLP, Douglas P. Dehler and Paul W. Zimmer of O’Neil Cannon Hollman Dejong & Laing SC; Bruse Loyd of Jones Gillaspia & Loyd LLP and Brian H. Mahany of Mahany Law.
The HP Age Discrimination Class Action Lawsuit is Donna J. Forsyth, et al. v. HP Inc., et al., Case No. 5:16-cv-04775, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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