Can a Man of 25 Claim Age Bias?

By John Cloud/Paramus

It's just awful to be a young adult in America today. Movies venerate our elders; ads fetishize the mature body. And there's nary a million to be found in the new economy for, say, twentysomething computer whizzes. O, to be old!

But now a court has taken up the plight of the young, recognizing in an unusual and potentially groundbreaking decision a new civil right to be green. Earlier this year, the supreme court of New Jersey unanimously ruled that Michael Sisler, 31, can proceed with an age-discrimination suit against Bergen Commercial Bank in Paramus, N.J. The case will go to trial in the near future, but it began in 1993, when Sisler was an employee at New Era, a local bank his grandfather had founded. As Sisler tells the story in court papers, chairman Anthony Bruno of Bergen Commercial, a larger financial institution in the same area, began phoning him at New Era. Bruno said he had heard good things about Sisler. He eventually asked the young man to become Bergen's vice president of credit-card operations--a swank job for anyone, let alone a 25-year-old college dropout. He would make $70,000 a year and have use of a company car. Sisler said yes. (Duh.)

A few days before Sisler started, Bruno took him to lunch. He then asked a question that had somehow not occurred to him before: How old are you, anyway? Bruno was floored by the answer. Don't tell anyone, the bank chief warned. Sisler's youth could embarrass co-workers and, worse, anger Bergen's board.

Days after Sisler started the job in September 1993, he got a call from Bruno. It wasn't working out, Bruno said. Sisler asked for a chance to prove himself but says he never got one. Sisler was told to report to a fellow vice president (instead of the chairman) and was assigned to a forlorn branch. In January 1994, Sisler was fired--without cause, he claims.

Sisler cried age discrimination. The bank brushed him off at first, saying that even if it had fired him solely because of his age--which it denied--only older people could sue on such grounds. But after a five-year battle, New Jersey's highest court disagreed, ruling in February that the state's Law Against Discrimination prohibits bias based on any consideration of age. The case now goes to trial to determine if the bank, in fact, fired Sisler because of his age. (Bergen has never fully told its side of the story. But Bergen lawyer Angelo Genova said Sisler wasn't performing up to the bank's standards before he was let go. The bank has also alleged in a lawsuit that Sisler took files that didn't belong to him.)

The New Jersey decision was unusual. The bank would have already prevailed in most states, where antidiscrimination laws--like the federal one--set a minimum age of 40 for those claiming age bias. The New Jersey ruling wasn't unprecedented, though. In the 1980s, courts in Maine, New York and Oregon allowed similar suits to proceed almost unnoticed. But the New Jersey court has a reputation for issuing cutting-edge rulings in employment law. (The state's liberal decisions on sexual-harassment law foreshadowed a national push to broaden the scope of such law.) Eighteen other states have similar antidiscrimination statutes, with no minimum age. "If the same issue were raised in one of those places, the plaintiff's counsel would say, 'They did this in New Jersey,' and the court would pay attention," says Michael Ossip, chairman of an American Bar Association subcommittee on age discrimination. In other words, next time you tell the new kid down the hall that he needs to pay his dues, you could end up paying them for him.

--By John Cloud/Paramus