The three chairmen criticized the court’s decision in a case involving a 54-year-old man who was demoted, saying the ruling flouted Congress’s intent and created unfair obstacles to the victims of age discrimination.
In a 5-to-4 ruling last June, the Supreme Court created a tougher burden of proof for plaintiffs in age bias cases. Previously, if an employee could prove that age was a factor in an adverse employment decision, like a demotion or a layoff, the employer then had to show that it had acted for a valid reason other than age discrimination. But as a result of the June ruling, employees now face the full burden of demonstrating that age was the deciding factor.
“This extremely high burden really undermines workers’ ability to hold employers accountable,” said Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
He was joined at a news conference by Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. The chairmen said the Supreme Court’s ruling came at an especially bad time because more than two million Americans 55 and over were unemployed and because the number of age discrimination cases filed last year jumped 29 percent over 2007 levels.
The court’s decision, in Gross v. F.B.L. Financial Services, was generally welcomed by business because it made it harder for plaintiffs to win cases.
Michael W. Fox, a corporate lawyer scheduled to testify before Congress on Wednesday, said he would defend the court’s ruling, adding that it helped provide clarity and that the old formula was “problematic.”
“It was terribly confusing both to courts and juries,” Mr. Fox said. “The courts were somewhat in disarray as to what the state of the law was.”
Mr. Leahy asserted that the court’s ruling was an “activist” decision, noting that the court had established a different burden of proof for age discrimination cases than for race, sex and religion discrimination cases.
“What our bill does is restore the intent of Congress, an intent that I believe the Supreme Court negligently ignored,” Mr. Leahy said.
The ruling’s defenders said that Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority decision had followed Congressional intent, noting that Congress had amended the main employment discrimination act to make the burden of proof easier for plaintiffs, but had not done so with the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
Michael Eastman, executive director of labor policy for the United States Chamber of Commerce, said his organization was open to discussing whether to adjust the newly established burden of proof in age discrimination cases. “We would be very concerned to the extent that the proposal goes further than that,” Mr. Eastman said.
AARP, the nation’s largest advocacy organization, with 40 million members, vigorously backed the proposed legislation, the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act.
“Unless Congress passes this bill, too many older workers who have been victims of arbitrary age discrimination will be denied their day in court,” said Nancy LeaMond, an executive vice president of AARP.