Four former employees of Silicon Valley tech icon Hewlett-Packard have filed an age discrimination lawsuit alleging they were ousted amid a purge of older workers.
Hewlett-Packard began layoffs in 2012, before the company broke into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise last year, and have escalated the layoffs since, eventually hitting tens of thousands of workers.
The goal “was to make the company younger,” said the complaint filed Aug. 18 in U.S. District Court in San Jose. “In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination … and then systematically replacing them with younger employees. HP has hired a disproportionately large number of new employees under the age of 40 to replace employees aged 40 and older who were terminated.”
Arun Vatturi, a 15-year Palo Alto employee at HP who was a director in process improvement until he was laid off in January at age 52, and Sidney Staton, in sales at HP in Palo Alto for 16 months until his layoff in April 2015 at age 54, have joined in the lawsuit with a former employee from Washington, removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63. The group is seeking class-action status for the court action and claims HP broke state and federal laws against age discrimination.
HP in 2012 announced it would cut 27,000 jobs. The company continued to announce layoffs, which to date total more than 80,000.
“Hewlett Packard Enterprise has a long-standing commitment to the principles of equal employment opportunity and age inclusion is no exception,” a company spokesman said in a statement. “The decision to implement a workforce reduction is always difficult, but we are confident that our decisions were based on legitimate factors unrelated to age.”
HP Inc. did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
The lawsuit alleges that HP’s human resources department in 2013 issued written guidelines mandating that 75 percent of all external hires should be fresh from school or “early career” applicants.
Central to the lawsuit’s claims are statements attributed to Meg Whitman [pictured above], who is now HP chairwoman and HP Enterprise CEO.
“We need to return to a labor pyramid … where you have a lot of early career people who bring a lot of knowledge who you’re training to move up through your organization, and then people fall out either from a performance perspective or whatever,” Whitman said in a 2013 meeting when she was the chief executive before the company split, according to the complaint. “And we put in place an informal rule to some extent which is, ‘Listen, when you are replacing someone, really think about the new style of IT skills.'”
Whitman’s purported statements were the only aspect of the case that surprised Norman Matloff, a UC Davis computer science professor who studies age discrimination in tech. Age-related bias in Silicon Valley is “standard practice” and lets employers swap out higher-cost older workers for younger, cheaper labor, Matloff said.
“If there is anything surprising it’s that someone like Meg Whitman let her guard down and said either publicly or semi-publicly, ‘We’ve got to make our workforce younger,'” Matloff said.
Typically, tech executives will argue that “only the younger workers have the new, up-to-date skills,” Matloff said. But Whitman’s comments quoted in the lawsuit about training “early career people” suggest HP was not concerned about employees coming in as relatively blank slates, he said.
“That one little comment — it is very significant,” Matloff said. “It destroys the argument that the employers use to hire only younger people.”
Google has also been hit with an age discrimination lawsuit, filed last year, with one of the plaintiffs in July filing to have it made a collective action by all former Google workers allegedly discriminated against on the basis of age. The lawsuit revealed that Google is under federal investigation for age bias.
U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission data show age-discrimination charges across all U.S. businesses dropped to 20,144 last year from 23,264 in 2010. The commission’s findings of age discrimination over that period fell to 611 cases from 753. In California, the number of charges dropped to 1,569 in 2014 from 1,856 in 2010. Data specific to the tech sector was not available.
© 2016 San Jose Mercury News under contract with NewsEdge. -.
Will G:
Posted: 2016-08-26 @ 11:23am PT
The article says that an employee from Washington, removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63. Can you be laid off at that age, or wouldn’t they be able to retire instead?
