Supreme Court hears oral arguments on Kentucky's public-employee retirement system
In a case being watched by education groups, the U.S. Supreme Court has heard oral arguments on whether certain disparities in Kentucky's public-employee retirement system violate a federal age-discrimination law. By the end of the hourlong argument, it seemed clear that a majority of the justices disagreed with the position of the Bush administration, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), that Kentucky's system violates the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. The case arose because of the different ways the retirement system handles workers who retire for disability reasons and those who retire because they have served the requisite length of time, which in Kentucky is 20 years of service or at age 55 with five years of employment. An employee of the Jefferson County, Ky., sheriff's department who was 61 years old when he sought disability retirement was told he could only retire under the regular retirement plan. The employee sued with the aid of the EEOC, which argued that Kentucky's plan provided lesser benefits to certain older workers who sought to retire on disability, and thus discriminated against them based on age. The National School Boards Association (NSBA), in a friend-of-the-court brief filed on Kentucky's side, argues that some school districts' early-retirement incentive plans have run into objections from the EEOC on age-discrimination grounds. “The ADEA prohibits only arbitrary age discrimination,” the NSBA's brief says. During the oral arguments, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he saw no indications that Kentucky had based its retirement systems on invidious age-based stereotypes. “We're talking about age, which is not an immutable characteristic,” Breyer said. “Everybody gets older.”
Education Week By Mark Walsh
[Editor’s Note: Below are background on the case, Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC., Docket No. 06-1037, including NSBA’s brief, and the transcript of the argument before the Court.]
NSBA School Law pages on Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC
Transcript of oral argument