When letting someone in your department go, you do all you can to avoid a discrimination backlash. But can a staffer use something a different supervisor said to a different employee as evidence of discrimination?

A recent Supreme Court ruling says it can.

As part of Sprint/United Management Co.’s company-wide layoff plan, a Business Development manager was forced to let one of his veteran employees go. He was careful to explain that layoffs were happening in every department, and that the reduction-in-force was nothing personal.

The employee respected her manager’s explanation, took her severance package, and all was well.

Then the employee caught wind of how the other terminations played out. A number of other supervisors had made some offhand, age-related remarks, and the fired employees believed the “reduction-in-force” was just a smokescreen for age discrimination.

Even though the first employee didn’t experience anything firsthand that’d make her think the company was violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), she claimed the other employee’s testimony applied to her situation.

The company argued that only testimony from similarly situated employees — in this case, those terminated by the same supervisor — should be allowed into someone else’s case.

But the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the employee’s “me-too!” argument. Comments were made by different supervisors and not to her directly, but because the terminations were a part of the same company-wide layoff plan, other employees’ testimony may have proved useful.

There is a sliver of good news for employers: “Me-too” evidence isn’t applicable to all cases. Whether evidence of discrimination by other supervisors is applicable in an individual’s ADEA case is fact-based, and a blanket rule certainly wouldn’t apply.

What’s a company’s best course of action when handling massive layoffs? Being as honest and clear as possible with why they’re happening is a start. But how your managers and staffers handle a situation is just as important as other department managers do — otherwise, the entire company can find itself paying for something said to a single employee.

Cite: Sprint/United Management Co. v. Mendelsohn, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 06-1221, 2/26/08.

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Tags: ADEA, me-too, terminations