It’s legal to give employees an incentive to retire early, but it’s not legal to make the incentives greater for one set of employees than another on the basis of their age.
That’s the lesson from today’s announcement by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it has settled an Age Discrimination in Employment Lawsuit against a Phoenix-area school district that it alleged “used an early retirement incentive plan which granted greater economic benefits to employees based upon their younger age.”
The early retirement incentive in this case–adopted by Murphy School District No. 21 in the early 1980s–became facially discriminatory once the Older Workers Benefit Protection Act was enacted in 1992, the EEOC said.
The EEOC said that the school district agreed to pay $138,000 to compensate over two dozen employees who took early retirement under the program.
Here’s more information on the lawsuit and settlement.
