Eli Lilly Facing Another Class Action Over Alleged Age Discrimination

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A proposed collective action alleges Eli Lilly & Company and Lilly USA, LLC have “systematically” discriminated against qualified employees over the age of 40 by denying them promotions in favor of younger workers.

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According to the nine-page lawsuit, the pharmaceutical outfit’s “companywide age bias” towards younger employees is “well documented [sic].” The suit relays that in an attempt to balance “what it perceives as a skew” toward older workers on a national level, Eli Lilly has been pushing to retain millennial employees by disproportionately promoting them over older workers with similar or better qualifications.

As the case tells it, since approximately 2017, when a senior executive announced Eli Lilly’s aim to “correct” the perception that the company’s national workforce favored older workers, the defendants have “openly espous[ed] an aggressive strategy of hiring and retaining Millennial employees” at the expense of older workers.

Per the complaint, Eli Lilly has faced similar age discrimination lawsuits in the past, including one in September 2022, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed the defendants routinely failed to hire older employees on the basis of age. Another suit, pending as of August 2022, also challenges the “systematic age discrimination” in the defendants’ hiring procedures, the filing says.

The plaintiff, a 53-year-old New York resident and employee of Eli Lilly since August 2016, has herself “fallen victim” to the defendants’ disproportionate preference toward younger employees for promotions, the lawsuit contends.

According to the case, when the plaintiff’s manager took medical leave in November 2021 and did not return, the woman stepped in as the interim district sales manager and led her team from roughly March to August 2022. The woman then interviewed to become her team’s permanent district sales manager but was denied the position in favor of a much younger and less-experienced employee, the suit says.

“Even though she had successfully led her team for ten (10) months and maintained its position as the highest performing team out of 93 teams across the country,” the complaint reads, “Eli Lilly gave the position to a less-qualified employee who was 27 years old with less than two-and-a-half years’ worth of sales experience.”

The plaintiff claims that, in her time working for Eli Lilly, she has witnessed a number of other older workers overlooked for promotions that then pass to younger and less-experienced employees, the filing adds.

The lawsuit looks to represent any Eli Lilly employee in the United States who is over the age of 40 and who has been denied a promotion within the relevant time period.

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