EEOC v. G-K-G, Inc.

EEOC v. G-K-G, Inc.

Opinion

 [*743]  POSNER, Chief Judge. William Blumenthal was employed as a salesman by G-K-G, Inc., a wholesale distributor of Seiko watches. Fired one month before turning 70, he brought suit against G-K-G under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 29 U.S.C. § 621 et seq. While the suit was pending, G-K-G sold all its assets to Seiko, which was added as a defendant; and, before trial, the district judge ruled that Seiko was, as a matter of law, G-K-G's successor for purposes of liability under the age-discrimination law. A jury brought in a verdict for Blumenthal, awarding him $ 343,691 in back pay which the judge doubled because the jury had found that the defendants' violation of the law was willful. Later the judge awarded Blumenthal more than $ 370,000 in costs and attorney's fees, but the appeal from that award has been stayed to enable the judge to rule on a request for additional fees.

A month after Blumenthal filed his suit, the Equal Employment [**2]  Opportunity Commission filed a largely identical suit against G-K-G but with one additional charge--that G-K-G's pension and profit-sharing plan discriminated against employees aged 70 or older. The suits were consolidated. After the Commission dropped its challenge to the pension and profit-sharing plan, and before the trial began, the district judge dismissed its suit as duplicative of Blumenthal's. The Commission appeals from this dismissal, and the defendants from the judgment against them in Blumenthal's suit. We begin with the Commission's appeal.

The Commission's brief is full of sonorous rhetoric about its supposedly dominant role in the enforcement of the age-discrimination law, its paramount responsibility to eradicate age discrimination, its superior perspective, its commitment to obtaining the most satisfactory overall relief, the danger that an individual plaintiff with his narrow interests may settle prematurely, and so on in that vein. There are many reasons not to take these claims seriously. To begin with, the Commission is a party to only a small percentage of the age-discrimination cases that are filed. The vast majority are brought by individuals with no participation [**3]  by the Commission. At argument we asked the Commission's counsel for a memorandum on what percentage of cases is brought by the Commission. The memorandum reveals that the Commission does not keep such statistics and is not aware of any institution that does. It  [*744]  has no empirical basis for its claim of paramountcy and apparently no interest in creating one.

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