Covenant Woods Senior Living, LLC and BrightSpace Senior Living, LLC (together, “Covenant Woods”), which operate the Covenant Woods retirement community in Columbus, Georgia, violated federal law when they fired a 78-year-old employee from her position as a receptionist because of her age and disability, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charged in a lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, the receptionist, who was recognized as one of Covenant Woods’ employees of the year in January 2022, was employed by the company for over 14 years until her sudden termination in February 2022. In that month, the receptionist was briefly hospitalized. Upon her release from the hospital, the receptionist was asked by Covenant Woods’ general manager how long she planned to continue to work, whether she needed to work, and whether she would like to spend her time traveling and seeing family instead of working.
Despite the receptionist’s insistence that she intended to continue working, and despite having never previously raised any substantial performance concerns to the receptionist, the general manager told the receptionist that Covenant Woods no longer had confidence in her ability to work, citing her recent hospitalization. The company fired her the next day and replaced her with significantly younger employees. Such alleged conduct violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which respectively prohibit age and disability discrimination in the workplace.
