Did age figure into Boeing layoffs?
Krolik, 54, worked in Everett as a liaison to companies that install seats and other components on Boeing jetliners. When he found out all the others in his work group who got layoff notices were in their 50s, he became suspicious.
Now, 10 months after Boeing began eliminating 30,000 jobs, a group of former nonunion workers is preparing to file a class-action age-discrimination lawsuit. They allege Boeing's controversial retention-rating system was used to weed out older, better-paid employees.
Boeing denies it targeted workers for layoffs based on age.
The employees' lawyer, Judith Lonnquist, said she had planned to file the lawsuit in King County Superior Court next week but postponed action after Perkins Coie, Boeing's outside law firm, learned about the pending case and requested an informational meeting.
Ken Mercer, a Boeing spokesman in Chicago, said the company voluntarily investigated nearly 90 age-discrimination complaints by laid-off Puget Sound-area workers with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Washington State Human Right Commission. The company found no merit in any of them, he said.
Mercer said workers laid off despite having 20, 30 or even 40 years' service proves only that Boeing's current downsizing cuts profoundly deep. "I can't emphasize enough that people of all backgrounds have been and will be affected by these employment reductions," Mercer said.
An age-bias lawsuit would be just the latest labor headache for the aerospace company. Boeing already is fighting a class-action suit filed by Asian-American workers, who accused Boeing of bypassing them for promotions and raises because of their ethnicity.
The company also has paid out $19.5 million to settle two high-profile bias cases since 1999. Boeing reached settlements with a group of African Americans alleging discrimination and a group of female and minority workers claiming a lack of pay parity.
At the heart of the age-bias complaint is Boeing's retention-rating system, in which supervisors assign an "A" grade to the top-performing 40 percent of their workers, a "B" to the middle 30 percent and a "C" to the bottom 30 percent.
Boeing halted the practice in 1999 after receiving numerous reports of dissatisfied workers. One manager complained in an e-mail to Boeing's top human-resources executive that the unhappy workers included not only those in the bottom 30 percent, "but most of the (B) people as they believe they should be at the top."
However, last fall Boeing resurrected the ranking system after announcing it would quickly cut up to 30,000 jobs nationwide. Performance ratings were given to Boeing's nonunion workers and those who belong to the engineering and technical union.
Layoffs of Machinists union members are based on seniority within job classifications.
Laurie McCann, a senior attorney with the AARP Foundation Litigation, which pursues legal reform for older Americans, maintains that percentage-based rankings similar to Boeing's have often been used to mete out the harshest evaluations to older workers.
The AARP last year intervened on behalf of Ford Motor managers who sued the automaker for age discrimination.
Ford adopted a rating system three years ago to identify weak managers. The top 10 percent were given A's, and the next 80 percent were rated B's. Managers at the bottom 10 percent (later lowered to 5 percent) who received C's for two consecutive years could be fired or demoted.
The lawyers who analyzed Ford's data found that managers older than 50 were nearly five times more likely to rate a C than those younger than 50, or 15.1 percent vs. 3.1 percent. The gulf was even wider between those 54 to 59, 16.7 percent of whom were rated C's, and managers 30 to 34, just 1.2 percent of whom rated at the bottom.
"When you look at the statistics, lo and behold, older workers get most of the C's," McCann said.
Ford argued that the numbers were misleading because workers who become managers at a younger age likely possess "high potential" as executives. Nonetheless, Ford reached a $10.6 million settlement with about 425 managers and dropped the rule forcing a certain percentage of managers into the lowest tier.
Lonnquist, the Seattle employment-law attorney, argues Boeing's retention ratings lacked well-defined measuring criteria. That, she said, left the fate of too many careers to the whims of individual supervisors.
Lonnquist plans to seek demographic data from Boeing to see if workers older than 40, the age at which they qualify for federal age-discrimination protection, were overrepresented among those dropped from the payroll.
"Do I think someone at the top of the Boeing Co. surreptitiously said 'Get rid of the older workers?' I don't think so. Is it part of the corporate culture? Probably," Lonnquist said.
Mercer, the Boeing spokesman, said the company enforces a no-discrimination policy. He defended the performance assessment as fair, saying that every rating given by a supervisor is reviewed by two separate groups of higher-level managers.
"No one is evaluated by only one person," he said.
Mercer noted that employees can appeal their ratings. Some 210 Boeing workers did just that, he said. Ratings were modified in 6 percent of the cases; 94 percent were left unchanged.
Krolik, the laid-off Boeing worker, understands that some might view the lawsuit as collective grievances by employees with less-than-stellar performance. He insisted that isn't so.
An ebullient man with a beefy build who earned $67,000 last year at Boeing, he proffers a sheaf of certificates for outstanding work he'd earned at Boeing through the years.
As Krolik saw it, a 34-year-old co-worker who had joined his group only a year earlier could not match the knowledge and skills of more experienced people who were laid off.
Last fall, when thousands of layoff notices began going out, Boeing unexpectedly announced it would no longer give credit for length of service in determining ratings.
Krolik was stunned when his manager told him he had the worst retention rating among 12 people in his group, putting him first in line among four people laid off.
Krolik's previous rating, issued in 1999, was R2, equivalent to a B in the new system. Ironically, Krolik's supervisor explained at the time that he wasn't rated higher because he had recently transferred into the supplier group and lacked his peers' experience with the new assignment.
"You would expect experience to count for something. What kind of logic is that?" Krolik asked.
Mercer said Boeing stopped taking seniority into account in performance evaluations so as not to penalize younger employees.
Barbara Christensen, a quality administrator, was among the first group of Boeing workers getting 60-day layoff warnings in October. Christensen hadn't received a retention rating since 1998, when she was rated a 2 (similar to a B). Then, on Oct. 12, she learned her rating had dropped to a C.
Christensen thinks she knows why. "Because I was making $70,000 a year," she said.
At 52, Christensen is five years older than the average Boeing employee. Boeing denies age played a role in her dismissal. With her consent, the company agreed to discuss her personnel file.
Christensen's job group included 68 other workers, Mercer said. Of those, nine people older than Christensen were rated A's, including a 57-year-old. Three other older workers were rated B's. Employees who fell into the A and B groups had average ages of 46, compared with 47 for the C group, Mercer said.
Boeing simply chose to retain workers whose skills and contributions best fit the company's needs, Mercer said.
"There is no evidence to support her allegation of age bias," Mercer said.
Like Krolik, Christensen has had a hard time finding work. She has a second mortgage on her house and her savings are drying up. She recently filed for bankruptcy protection.
Last week, she had her first job interview since she was laid off Dec. 14. She hopes to become a lead security screener at the airport in Sheridan, Wyo., near her childhood home.
Kyung M. Song can be reached at 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com.