I began having a great deal of spare time after being laid off at Sprint. I was over 55, widowed and not really expecting to find gainful employment at anywhere near my previous salary. I had already encountered age discrimination much earlier – in my forties. A head hunter told me point blank that companies didn’t want her to present people much over the age of 30!
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Now lets face it, all of you who think social security is a rip off, how do you expect to make it through those so-called golden years if the company makes sure that you only get half your pension and social security is viewed as “bad” by the yuppieville community?
I was fortunate in that I could chose between the social security accounts of two dead husbands to help augment my income. Also I had enough time in the company and I was old enough to get my half pension.
But in this case it was discovered that Sprint had done a number of things to cook the books in laying off its employees. They took a horrible philosophy by Jack Welch and turned it into a nightmare. They told us that they would rate our performance and those who scored in the 10% lowest in the bell curve would get laid off. In my case, however, I had gotten very good performance numbers in previous reviews and I got a middle number in my last review. Unknown to me, however, they had changed that number and made it lower so that they could justify laying me off. They never told me what they did, the lawyers found the information in the discovery phase.
So I am celebrating today because Sprint has finally settled the suit. Now we are vindicated!
For those of you who believe all the crap the rethugs put out about trial lawyers, Shirley Williams was the one who was the original complainant in this suit and she had this to say:
Williams, who has since earned a real estate license, commended the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who she said worked for years “making absolutely nothing off the case.”
“It’s incomprehensible the volume of paperwork they went through,” she said. “I’m truly humbled when I see how much they’ve done and think how they’ve listened to every story. They earned every cent.”
The voluminous case included more than 4,600 separate court filings. More than 200 depositions of Sprint managers and employees were taken and millions of pages of documents were produced.
The case drew national attention when Sprint was ordered to produce “metadata,” information hidden or embedded in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. The plaintiffs’ attorneys had asked the court to require Sprint to make available “scrubbed” or “locked” data that had been compiled in making its staff- reduction decisions.
They actually got to the point where they had two or three lawfirms handling all the depositions (there were close to 1700 of us and Sprint insisted in depo-ing all of us!)
This case was all about being shortsighted and obsessed with wall street’s opinion of the stock. I would wish we could get to some point where we put balance back into the investment community where the bottom line and the illusion of doing well is not the sole obsession.
Crossposted at the Orange place: