Financial issues are rarely impeccable in any organization, and the case of the city of Tampa is no exception. Providing a raise for the staff employed in public companies, the authorities did not take the age issue into account. Even though the people who received raises below the average were over 40, technically, the compensation plan cannot be considered illegal, seeing how it is related to the employees’ experience and not to their actual age.
Therefore, it must be admitted that the proposed compensation plan does not align with the basic principles of the disparate impact theory, and the case cannot be defined as “an unjustified disparate impact” (Bernardin, 2002, p. 60).
On the one hand, the very concept of the raise based on the five-year experience sounds rather reasonable. Indeed, the employees who have been working for quite long in a public company must have acquired the necessary skills to provide the services of the finest quality and, thus, deserve encouragement. At this point, no discrimination issues can be traced to the accepted financial incentives strategy.
Therefore, giving the police officers “the range that was equal to the lowest step” (Bernardin, 2002, p. 579) was rather reasonable. Seeing how “the majority of personnel were in the three lowest ranks” (Bernardin, 2002, p. 579), the given solution seems quite justified.
On the other hand, it could be argued that the given practice still concerns the age of the employees. Traditionally, the experience is in direct proportion to an employee’s age (AARP, 2012, p. 4). Therefore, when basing the idea of a raise on the age of employees, one is most likely to be discriminative towards the people who are not included in a certain age group.
In the given case, the burden of prima false falls onto the shoulders of the state authorities designing the concept of the incentive and can be defined as the “burden of proof” (Bernardin, 2002, p. 18), i.e., the evidence “needed to prove age discrimination” – or its absence.
However, in the given case, the people who acclaim to have been discriminated on account of their age, in fact, err in their judgment. While it might seem that the amount of the money granted to the employees in public companies depends on their age, it is based on the number of years – or months, for that matter – that the employees have been working in the company for. Hence, stating that the state adheres to the age profiling policy is technically incorrect.
Although the idea of connecting the experience of the employees and the raise that they are going to obtain from the state might seem somewhat arguably, seeing how experience does not always mean the quality of performance, technically, no disparate impact can be spotted in the given situation.
As long as the key parameter, by which the raise is provided for an employee, is unrelated to the employee’s age, the minority group, i.e., the senior employees, is not considered to be affected negatively by the given financial practice. Arguably, the practice of connecting a raise to the experience in the company is rather controversial.
Still, as it has been stressed above, experience and quality are not necessarily connected. However, the claim that the given practice is discriminatory to the staff members of a particular age is inconsistent, since it concerns not age, but the experience.
Reference List
AARP (2012). Phased retirement and flexible retirement arrangements: Strategies for retaining skilled workers.
Bernardin, J. (2002). Human resource management: An experiential approach (6th ed.). New York City, US: McGraw Hill/Irwin.