No Settlement in Age Discrimination Lawsuit
NS&D Monitor
4/17/2015
There could be a third trial in the long-running age discrimination case involving Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after two mediation sessions ended inconclusively last week. LLNL officials and lawyers for 130 workers laid off from the lab met twice with mediator David Rotman last week but a deal was not reached. Gary Gwilliam, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the two sides remain in contact, but he was not optimistic that a deal could be reached. “A settlement is not looking good from our perspective,” Gwilliam said. Livermore spokeswoman Lynda Seaver declined to comment other than to say that the lab was examining its options.
Prior to the conclusion of the mediation sessions, Seaver said the lab was hoping to reach a deal. “It is difficult to predict whether this process will lead to a settlement, much less what the amount of any settlement would be,” Seaver said. “The fact is, the lawsuit has been pending for nearly six years, two lengthy and expensive trials have been conducted, only a handful of individuals have had their claims adjudicated—and even those are on appeal. If there is a way to bring to a conclusion this expensive and distracting exercise, arising from events that occurred nearly seven years ago, then it makes good sense to consider it.”
An Alameda County jury found in favor of a group of five former employees in a breach of contract case in early 2013, awarding the former employees $2.7 million, but a separate jury rejected the same employees’ claims of age discrimination in connection to their layoffs last year. The five employees were part of a group of 130 workers suing the lab over the 2008 layoff of a total of 440 lab employees. A third trial involving a new subset of the employees—10 scientists and engineers that claim they were the victims of age discrimination and breach of contract—has been delayed until at least October.
