Two former airport workers say the city of Portland forced them to undergo intrusive and unnecessary psychological exams as part of an effort to justify getting rid of them, a lawsuit filed this week claims.
Those two workers — one of whom was allegedly fired and the other of whom was reassigned — argue the real reason they were moved was age discrimination.
Portland spokeswoman Jessica Grondin said that the city does not comment on litigation related to employment matters.
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Plaintiffs Robert Lang, 68, and Stephen Congdon, 67, were maintenance workers at Portland International Jetport who allege that, before they were dispatched from their airport jobs in 2017, their supervisor made repeated comments to each of them about their ages and asked when the men planned to retire.
On multiple occasions, the supervisor added peculiar challenges when giving Lang otherwise routine airport clearance tests, the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court Tuesday, claims.
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According to the court filing, on one occasion, the supervisor made Lang say the names of a set of taxiway signs “five times fast.” On another, it said, the supervisor threatened to get rid of Lang if he couldn’t give the full name of a company that occupies a nearby building that’s not on the airfield or part of the test.
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The supervisor did not force younger workers to perform similar extra challenges when being tested, the lawsuit claims. But even though Lang passed the test multiple times, the supervisor stood in the way of Lang’s clearance to work on the airfield, refusing to allow him to complete the test on one occasion and refusing to sign off on his successful completion on another, the suit states.
When Lang briefly couldn’t remember the word “coyote” during a conversation about an animal he’d seen — a lapse the lawsuit describes as a simple “brain fart” — the supervisor used the instance in part to justify ordering him to undergo a psychiatric exam, the lawsuit claims.
In Congdon’s case, the worker was moved from second to third shift while he was on medical leave recovering from heart surgery. The supervisor screamed at Congdon when the worker drove a van past an airfield stopping point before getting permission from the control tower, even though it was 2 a.m. and there was nobody in the control tower to give permission, the lawsuit claims.
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After this incident, Congdon was also required to see doctors — including “the same neuropsychologist Mr. Lang saw” — lined up by the city to evaluate his fitness for work, the court filing alleges.
The doctor allegedly asked the men about their private romantic lives, among other questions they described as unrelated to their airport jobs.
“When the city’s agents were unsuccessful in pressuring the plaintiffs to retire, the city manufactured reasons to send plaintiffs to ‘doctors-for-hire’ to get medical examinations they did not need based on exaggerated and falsified facts provided by the city,” the lawsuit reads, in part. “When these biased and illegal medical examinations predictably determined that the plaintiffs could not perform their jobs as maintenance workers, the city forced Mr. Lang to take a lower-paid position elsewhere in the city and fired Mr. Congdon entirely.”
Lang and Congdon are seeking a jury trial. The former airport workers are asking for the court to award them unspecified amounts in financial damages, including for lost pay resulting from the men’s employment changes.
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