In practice, BFOQs for age are limited to the obvious (hiring a young actor to play a young character in a movie), when a job is physically demanding (police, firefighters, military service), or when public safety is a concern (for example, in the case of age limits for pilots, truck drivers, and bus drivers).
Some states like New York and New Jersey including District of Columbia have laws that protect younger workers from reverse age discrimination, a practice not prohibited under the ADEA.
Federal law enforcement officers, national park rangers and firefighters have a mandatory retirement age of 57, or later if they have had less than 20 years of service.
[29] In the United States, a person must generally be at least 14 years old to seek a job, and workers face additional restrictions on their work activities until they reach age 16.
[38] The court did, however, find that an issue of material fact existed as to whether or not the cancellation of insurance when the plaintiff's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint was filed was retaliatory in nature.
The summary judgment of the district court in favor of the school and against the plaintiff was vacated and the case remanded for further fact-finding on this specific issue.
[41] This case concerned how Hazen Paper fired Biggins, 62, a few weeks before his service would have reached the required number of years for his pension to vest.
The Court held that although the theory of disparate impact set forth in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) is also applicable under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 is narrower as it permits “otherwise prohibited” actions “where the differentiation is based on reasonable factors other than age.”[49][50][51] Federal Express Corp. v. Holowecki, 552 U.S. 389 (2008), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States on February 27, 2008.
[52][53] The Court accepted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s test for determining whether a filing constituted a charge as set forth in its amicus curiae brief as well as internal directives, and decided: “In addition to the information required by the regulations, i.e., an allegation and the name of the charged party, if a filing is to be deemed a charge it must be reasonably construed as a request for the agency to take remedial action to protect the employee’s rights or otherwise settle a dispute between the employer and the employee.”[53][54][55] The Court then decided that the documents filed in this case met these requirements.
[53][56][57][58] In Gomez-Perez v. Potter (2008), the United States Supreme Court allowed federal workers who experience retaliation as a result of reporting age discrimination under the law to sue for damages.
In a 5–4 opinion, the Court ruled that private-sector plaintiffs must prove that age was the "but for" cause of the adverse employment action they are suing over.
In September 2016, California passed state bill AB-1687, an anti-ageism law taking effect on 1 January 2017, requiring "commercial online entertainment employment" services that allow paid subscribers to submit information and resumes (such as IMDbPro), to honor requests to have their ages and birthdays removed.
The bill was supported by SAG-AFTRA's former and current presidents Ken Howard and Gabrielle Carteris, who felt that the law would help to reduce ageism in the entertainment industry.
[67] On 23 February 2017, U.S. District Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria issued a stay on the bill pending a further trial, claiming that it was "difficult to imagine how AB 1687 could not violate the First Amendment" because it inhibited the public consumption of factual information.
[68] In February 2018, Girdhari ruled that the law was unconstitutional, arguing that the state of California "[had] not shown that partially eliminating one source of age-related information will appreciably diminish the amount of age discrimination occurring in the entertainment industry."
The ruling was criticized by SAG-AFTRA, alleging that the court "incorrectly concluded there were no material disputed factual issues, while precluding the parties from acquiring additional evidence or permitting the case to go to trial".
18-882, 589 U.S. ___ (2020), is a case of the United States Supreme Court in which the justices considered the scope of protections for federal employees in the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.
[64][71] Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, 591 U.S. ___ (2020), is a United States Supreme Court case involving the ministerial exception of federal employment discrimination laws.
The case extends from the Supreme Court's prior decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2012)[72] which created the ministerial exception based on the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the United States Constitution, asserting that federal discrimination laws cannot be applied to leaders of religious organizations.
One of those rulings in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was the ruling in Morrissey-Berru v. Our Lady of Guadalupe School, in 2019, in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed a Catholic elementary school teacher's age discrimination suit to move forward.
The Supreme Court ruled in a 7–2 decision called Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru on July 8, 2020 that reversed the Ninth Circuit's ruling, affirming that the principles of Hosanna-Tabor, that a person can be serving an important religious function even if not holding the title or training of a religious leader, satisfied the ministerial exception in employment discrimination.
[75][76] The District of Columbia and twelve states (California, Florida, Iowa, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont) define age as a specific motivation for hate crimes.
[85][86] In Oregon v. Mitchell (1970), the Supreme Court considered whether the voting-age provisions Congress added to the Voting Rights Act in 1970 were constitutional.
[89] The Newsboys Strike of 1899 fought ageist employment practices targeted against youth by large newspaper syndicates in the Northeast.
The strike lasted two weeks, causing Pulitzer's New York World to decrease its circulation from 360,000 papers sold per day to 125,000.
[90] Although the price of papers was not lowered, the strike was successful in forcing the World and Journal to offer full buybacks to their sellers, thus increasing the amount of money that newsies received for their work.
[93] The AARP was founded in 1958 by Ethel Percy Andrus (a retired educator from California) and Leonard Davis (later the founder of the Colonial Penn Group of insurance companies).
In March 2017, it was reported that the national organization had decided to disband, but local chapters may continue to function under the OWL name or possibly another name.
[103] Old Lesbians Organizing for Change was founded in 1987; the mission of the organization is to "eliminate the oppression of ageism and to stand in solidarity against all oppressions" through “[the] cooperative community of Old Lesbian feminist activists from many backgrounds working for justice and the well-being of all old lesbians.”[104] Their initial meeting was inspired by the publication of the book Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism by Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich in 1983.
[107] The Freechild Project was formed in 2001 to identify, unify and promote diverse opportunities for youth engagement in social change by fighting ageism.