Can a reasonable jury find that a productive employee of 33 years fired "immediately upon" his employer learning that he had filed a charge of discrimination with the EEOC was fired in retaliation for having filed that charge? "Yes" answered the Sixth Circuit in reversing a summary judgment and remanding for trial in the case Mickey v. Zeidler Tool and Die Company, No. 06-1690 (6th Cir., January 31, 2008).
Cutting a longer story short: the employee, Mickey, had worked for the employer, Zeidler Tool and Die Company, for 33 years, had seen his pay and responsibilities substantially reduced in favor of a much younger employee, had his retirement intentions inquired of and filed a charge of age discrimination with the EEOC. He was fired "immediately upon [his employer] receiving notice of" the EEOC charge. But his claim that he was fired in retaliation for having filed the EEOC charge was thrown out on summary judgment by the district court.
In reinstating Mickey's retaliation claim and remanding it for trial, the Sixth Circuit clarified the evidentiary weight of immediate temporal proximity of the employer's notice of an EEOC charge and the employee's firing: "Where an adverse employment action occurs very close in time after an employer learns of a protected activity, such temporal proximity is significant enough to constitute evidence of a causal connection for the purposes of satisfying a prima facie case of retaliation."
Previous decisions by the Sixth Circuit had indicated that temporal proximity was alone insufficient to support a retaliation claim, that temporal proximity should be coupled with other evidence of retaliatory purpose. This rationale, the court explained, was misapplied to a situation where the employee was fired immediately upon the employer learning of the employee's charge to the EEOC: "if an employer immediately retaliates against an employee upon learning of his protected activity, the employee would be unable to couple temporal proximity with any such other evidence of retaliation because the two actions happened consecutively, and little other than the protected activity could motivate the retaliation."
