A long-time Michigan employee had served as general manager of his plant for 10 years when the owner began asking him about his retirement plans. That was in the middle of a series of pay reductions the owner had served to his manager. Feeling harassed, the manager filed an age discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As soon as the owner learned of it, he fired the manager.

What happened. A male employee joined Zeidler Tool and Die as a die-maker in 1971. In the late 1980s, Zeidler's owner opened an additional business in the state, a bed-and-breakfast catering to deer hunters. Needing to spend much time away from the plant, he named the male employee to the new position of general manager, up from shop supervisor, a job in which he had been supervising between 20 and 40 people. But the owner seems to have had a change of heart by 1997. That's when he began a campaign of lowering the general manager's salary and raising the salary of the much-younger assistant general manager. The general manager went from $90,000 to $75,000 to $70,000--with a final cut in 2004 to $52,000. At the same time, the owner raised the assistant's salary to $110,000.

What preceded the general manager's biggest pay cut was a discussion about his retirement in which he listed for the owner all the reasons he didn't want to retire. A few months later, he filed a charge of age bias with EEOC. EEOC notified Zeidler of the complaint within a week, but the owner was away. When he returned and learned of the charge, he fired the general manager. He sued for age bias and retaliation, but a federal district court judge rejected both claims. He appealed to the 6th Circuit, which covers Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee.

What the court said. The district judge denied his age bias claim because he had not clearly been replaced by a younger employee, and denied the retaliation charge, believing that temporal proximity between a protected act (filing the charge) and being fired isn't enough to prove retaliation. Appellate judges disagreed regarding retaliation, asserting that such immediacy is enough to imply a causal connection. But they did agree with the lower court that the assistant manager's job had become so different over the years from the general manager's job that he had not obviously been replaced by the younger man. So his age discrimination claim failed again, but the lower court must reconsider his retaliation claim. Mickey v. Zeidler Tool and Die, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, No. 06-1960 (1/31/08).

Point to remember: This case serves as yet another example where an employee's original discrimination complaint did not succeed, but a subsequent claim of retaliation for making that complaint was deemed more convincing.