I recently saw an unsettling movie, The Big Short, about the blatant fraud and corruption on Wall Street that led to the global economic collapse and the.Great Recession.
Like many film goers, I felt deeply troubled about the Titanic-sized failure of the American government to protect ordinary Americans from predatory behavior and criminality by Wall Street bankers and brokers. But later my thoughts turned to another failure that is currently being ignored by American government and the press, one that I see as an attorney who writes about the law and workers who are victims of abuse and discrimination in employment.
There has been undisputed and powerful evidence for years that the federal court system, like America’s financial system, operates to benefit powerful moneyed interests at the expense of ordinary American workers. A major indicator of this trend is that federal courts routinely dismiss employment discrimination lawsuits at a far higher rate than other types of business lawsuits.
My book, Betrayed: The Legalization of Age Discrimination in the Workplace, painstakingly documents how the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court have made it inordinately difficult for workers to prevail in an age discrimination lawsuit. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 ia weak and riddled with loopholes compared to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin and color. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a completely unnecessary ruling in 2009 requiring that age discrimination victims prove a far higher level of causation than is required under Title VII. A proposed federal law that would fix the Court’s disastrous ruling has languished in a Congressional committee for six years. Congress and the Court have legalized discrimination in employment based on age that would be illegal if the victim wore a hijab or hailed from Zimbabwe or Yemen.
At one point last spring, I attempted to contact the Judicial Conference of the United States, a 16-member body (with no citizen representative) that ostensibly runs the federal court system. I wanted to point out that discriminating against employment discrimination victims is tantamount to actual discrimination. I found the Conference’s web site but it contained no contact information. A spokesperson for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AOC) suggested that I send my correspondence to the federal circuit court in my jurisdiction, which has a seat on the Conference body. In exasperation, I submitted an “open letter” to whom it might concern requesting legal reform via a web form on the AOC web site. I have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the “leadership” of our federal court system is unapproachable.
In the movie, The Big Short, some savvy observers figured out the housing market was about to collapse and they found a way to make money on the collapse. It seems likely to me that one day the “bubble” surrounding the federal court system will burst. Just as there was almost universal faith in the housing market, Americans historically have shown a high degree of trust in the courts. That trust is eroded every time the court permits unscrupulous employers to use the legal system to deny workers respect, dignity and fundamental fairness.
Trust is lost when courts permit employers to use the legal system as a weapon against American workers.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama encouraged age discrimination in hiring when he signed an executive order in 2010 that permits federal agencies to bypass older workers and hire “recent” graduates and U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez earlier this year endorsed a private initiative by America’s largest corporations that openly discriminates against older workers. The federal government is the nation’s largest employer.
All of this is happening in plain sight but it has gone largely unreported by the tattered shreds of what remains of America’s once vigorous media. (I may sound a bit cynical on this score because the 18th richest man in the world, Sheldon Adelson, a casino operator and major Republican donor who owns a free newspaper in Israel, recently secretly purchased Nevada’s largest newspaper and immediately began testing the limits of journalism ethics.)
Like the housing market bubble, the bubble in the federal court system is attributable in large part to inattention, neglect and failure of accountability. Continue reading “The Big Short in the Federal Courts”