Appearances Can Be Deceiving

Don’t believe us? Take a look at how easy it is to become fooled by a statute’s title, which seems so straightforward. Let’s look at the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA). Its title seems clear enough: No discrimination because of pregnancy. But it’s deceiving. Recently, in a case out of the Northern District of Texas, Poucher v. Automatic Data Processing, a female employee allegedly casually mentioned to her supervisors at a company party that she and her husband were thinking of conceiving, according to the opinion. The opinion goes on to note that she was later fired; the company said the termination was for poor performance; she said it was in violation of the PDA. While she never was pregnant, the court said that intending to become pregnant, even absent conception, is a protected classification under the PDA. Apparently, our parents were wrong: You can be just a little bit pregnant.

Or let’s look at the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. It all seems simple enough: Employees age 40 and older are protected. Employees age 39 and younger are not. But what about a 47-year-old employee who claims she was discriminated against in favor of a 58-year-old employee. A violation of the ADEA? The answer is “yes,” according to a recent decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Dennis Cline v. General Dynamics Land Systems Inc. There, the company changed its health benefits, with the result that only employees 50 years or older remained eligible to receive full health benefits at retirement. Not so for employees 49 or younger. Well, employees between 40 and 49 claimed they were discriminated against in violation of the ADEA, and the 6th Circuit bought it. In an overly simplistic analysis, the court said that the fact that members within the protected class were beneficiaries of the discriminatory action of which other members of the protected class were victims doesn’t change the language of the statute, which prohibits age discrimination against any individual within the protected class. Talk about literal readings producing unintended results.