A Chinese senior engineer at Tulsa’s A.B. Jewell water treatment plant can’t move forward with an age and racial discrimination lawsuit after the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a district court’s summary judgment Tuesday in favor of the plaintiff’s employer, the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The worker alleged the city passed him over for a superintendent position because of his age and race to hire a younger, White candidate for the position instead in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and the Oklahoma Anti-Discrimination Act, per court documents in Jiang v. City of Tulsa.
However, the district court found that the plaintiff was unable to show that “the city was untruthful about valuing a candidate with leadership experience,” which the person who was hired had, and granted summary judgment to the city. The appeals court affirmed.
In his appeal, the plaintiff alleged retaliation related to the hiring process. At issue was the city’s decision to remove an education requirement for the position, per court documents.
The city initially hired the White worker for the role in question but “violated its written hiring policies” in doing so, according to the filing.
“Those policies required the city to hire someone with a college degree in biology, engineering, environmental sciences, or a related field. Yet the hired candidate didn’t have a degree at all,” the court documents said.
The plaintiff reported the city’s mistake to the civil service commission, which confirmed that the city had violated its policies. Tulsa removed the degree requirement “to reflect the city’s customary practice of substituting experience for education” and redid the hiring process, again hiring the candidate with greater leadership experience.
The plaintiff alleged that the city “retaliated by tailoring the revised education requirement ‘to the two white and younger applicants’” in response to his report to the civil service commission.
However, the plaintiff wasn’t able to contradict that the city changed the education requirement to reflect its previous practice, the appeals court said.
“While [the] City does not have much to add, we can confirm the Tenth Circuit’s summary judgement, which should speak for itself,” a City of Tulsa spokesperson said via email. An attorney for the plaintiff did not respond to a request for comment.