There’s a lot of baggage that comes along with the aging of America’s workforce, and some of that baggage isn’t so pretty. Here’s just one example: age discrimination.

Yesterday, a California state appeals court ruled that “a former Google executive in his 50s who was allegedly called ‘old fuddy-duddy’ and told he was ‘slow’ before being terminated in February 2004 has the right to sue the Internet giant for age discrimination,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.

This case should be a wake-up call for every manager and executive, because the issues raised in the story are all too familiar:

• A director-level employee (Brian Reid, formerly Google’s director of engineering) over the age of 50 had gotten only one written performance review—and it was a very positive one.
• In later conversations with senior management, Reid claims he was told that “his opinions and ideas were ‘obsolete’ and ‘too old to matter’ ” and that he was “ ‘slow,’ ‘fuzzy,’ ‘sluggish,’ ‘lethargic,’ did not ‘display a sense of urgency’ and lacked energy,” according to the Mercury News.
• Reid was later moved to a new role at Google, had his previous duties given to much-younger employees, and then was told he was not a “cultural fit” and would be fired from the engineering department.
• Later, according to the appeals court ruling, “senior Google executives discussed Reid’s effort to find a job in other areas of Google, and how there was no role for him. ‘We all agree on the job elimination angle,’ stated an e-mail from Stacy Sullivan, the director of human resources.”

Google denies any wrongdoing and issued a statement saying, “As our court filings have said, we believe this complaint to be unfounded and will vigorously defend against it.”

I’ve written a number of times about “The Talent-Shortage Myth” and my belief that America won’t have the huge talent shortage that so many predict because baby boomers will stay on the job much longer than previous generations. This is a good thing, from my perspective, but it also means that companies and managers will have to work that much harder to ensure that they treat each and every employee with fairness, sensitivity and compassion.

No matter how you slice it, this is an interesting case that bears watching, because it may set the bar for what we can expect in workplace dynamics for years to come.