Lawsuit claims Oracle fired Bay Area man because of his age

A Bay Area man claims in a lawsuit filed this week that software giant Oracle fired him because of his age.

Mark Bauer worked at Oracle for 23 years as a technical writer, manager and director before he allegedly fell victim to the company's "ageist culture" and was terminated in 2020 at age 66, he said in the suit filed Tuesday in San Francisco County Superior Court.

"In or around 2018, Oracle began making significant structural changes to the detriment of older workers," the suit by Bauer, of San Francisco, claimed. "Older employees were laid off at the same time younger employees were being hired. On more than one occasion, Oracle management brazenly rejected prospective hires based solely on their ages.

"Inappropriate remarks concerning age were also commonplace among the staff. Plaintiff endured ageist comments from nearly every manager he worked under during his time at Oracle."

Oracle, headquartered in Redwood City until moving to Austin two years ago, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm still operates its former headquarters as a large campus, and has offices in Santa Clara, Pleasanton, Belmont and San Francisco.

Bauer's lawsuit is the latest to accuse a major technology company of age-based discrimination. Oracle was sued in 2019 by former sales representative Catherine Beardsley, who alleged the firm subjected her to age discrimination, then fired her in 2017 at 64 because of her age. The company, in a 2019 federal court filing in Arizona, denied Beardsley's allegations, and said that while she had made sales, they were not "'significant' in light of her expected sales quotas." Beardsley and Oracle settled the case privately last year.

Last year, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that Santa Clara chip giant Intel discriminated against eight older workers during mass layoffs in 2015, following an investigation by The Oregonian newspaper, which had concluded that the firm's large-scale job cuts in 2015 and 2016 "were heavily skewed toward older workers." Intel, after the commission's finding, denied discriminating against older employees, telling The Oregonian that the layoffs were "based solely upon business needs."

Mountain View digital-advertising titan Google in 2019 settled for $11 million a long-running class-action lawsuit that accused it of discriminating against hundreds of older workers by failing to hire them because of their age. The company has consistently denied it discriminates on the basis of age, and said in a filing in U.S. District Court in San Jose that its actions regarding the two lead plaintiffs "were motivated by reasonable factors other than age." Under the settlement's terms, plaintiffs were to receive a minimum of $11,495, plus additional compensation for lost wages. Google, in settling, denied committing age discrimination, but agreed to train managers and workers on age-based bias, and to set up a committee in its recruiting department to focus on age diversity in software engineering, systems-reliability engineering and systems engineering.

Also in 2019, four former employees of tech icon IBM, all in their late 50s, filed a lawsuit accusing the company of targeting "gray hairs" and "old heads" for negative performance reviews so it could purge them as it formed a "Millennial Corps" and focused on hiring "early professionals." The case revolved around whether the former employees, who had signed severance agreements, had a legal claim against IBM. The company argued in a federal court filing that the workers were let go as part of a workforce reduction. A federal appeals court ruled last year that the severance agreements nullified the ex-workers' legal claims.

Five years ago, three dozen former employees of Palo Alto computer-hardware firm HP and software giant Hewlett-Packard Enterprise — which moved its headquarters from San Jose to Houston this year — claimed in a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Jose that they were fired because the companies wanted younger workers. The firms, in a 2020 court filing, claimed the ex-workers lacked a factual basis for their claims and were trying to create "an aura of discrimination that supposedly permeates all workforce reduction decisions." A November filing by both sides said they had "reached agreement on certain financial terms of a settlement, and (were) continuing to actively negotiate in the hope that a final resolution of this action will be reached."

Bauer, in his wrongful-termination suit against Oracle, is seeking unspecified damages and restitution.

Oracle, in a blog post last year about an employee group aiming to foster collaboration across generations, said, "cross-generational perspectives help us become better problem solvers and advocates for our customers, employees, and communities."

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