Los Angeles Age Discrimination Lawyer

Facing Age Discrimination in the Workplace?

Are you being treated differently at the workplace because of your age? Is your employer mistreating you because you're over the age of 40? You may have an age discrimination claim, and a Los Angeles employment attorney at Martinian & Associates INC. may be able to help. Our firm advocate for employees who are fired, laid off, demoted, suffer pay cuts, harassed and more because of their age. This is a violation of employment law, and workers deserve a strong defense against this mistreatment.

What Is Age Discrimination?

When it comes to age discrimination in the field of employment, defining what age discrimination is and what it is not can be helpful in understanding this concept.

What Age Discrimination Is 
Age discrimination is when an employer treats an employee or potential hire negatively simply because they are 40 years of age or older, according to the Age Discrimination Employment Act (ADEA).

Listed below are some scenarios that might constitute an age discrimination claim:

• An employer chooses not to hire someone solely based on the fact that said person is 40 years old or older.
• An employee is laid off or fired solely or primarily because they are over the age of 40, but their employer is claiming "poor performance" to cover up this wrongful termination.
• An employee is consistently harassed at the workplace by his supervisor because of his age.
• An employee is demoted or their pay was cut solely or primarily because of his or her age.

What Age Discrimination Is Not 
According to the law, age discrimination is not a valid claim for people under the age of 40. In some jurisdictions, there are laws for "reverse age discrimination," that is, favoring older employees over younger employees, but this is not the norm.

Discrimination and harassment because of age does not include the following:

• Light teasing
• Offhand comments
• Most isolated incidents

Reasonable Factors Other Than Age (RFOA)

According to this statute, employers who treat employees differently must provide the defense of RFOA, that is, their treatment of said employee is because of a reasonable factor other than the fact that they are over the age of 40.

According to § 1625(b) through (e) of the ADEA, RFOA is defined as follows:

A reasonable factor other than age is one that "is objectively reasonable when viewed from the position of a prudent employer mindful of its responsibilities under the ADEA under like circumstances." The question of whether a differentiation is based on a non-age factor "must be decided on the basis of all the particular facts and circumstances surrounding each individual situation."

To successfully assert the RFOA defense under the final rule, "an employer must show that the employment practice was both reasonably designed to further or achieve a legitimate business purpose and administered in a way that reasonably achieves that purpose in light of the particular facts and circumstances that were known, or should have been known, to the employer."

Retain a Los Angeles Age Discrimination Attorney to Fight for You

At Martinian & Associates INC., our Los Angeles employment lawyers fight for employees' rights to be free from age discrimination at the workplace. We understand that your livelihood and financial stability are on the line. Your job not only matters to you, but to your entire family. You can trust our firm to have your best interests in mind when dealing with an age discrimination claim.

Call us today for a free and confidential evaluation of your case to learn about legal action you can take!