FAA employees seek temporary halt to outsourcing effort

More than 800 flight service employees participating in an age discrimination lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration have asked a federal judge to block the outsourcing of their jobs until their case has been heard.

The employees have a good chance of prevailing when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rules on the case they filed in late March, said Charles Day Jr., one of the lawyers representing them, on Wednesday. But if their suit isn't settled before Oct. 3, the date that the agency plans to lay them off and transfer flight service work to Lockheed Martin Corp., they will suffer "irreparable harm," he said.

Day and Joseph Gebhardt, lawyers with the firm Gebhardt & Associates, late last week asked the court to grant them a preliminary injunction ordering the FAA to suspend outsourcing plans while the lawsuit is pending.

Without a preliminary injunction, flight service specialists will "incur massive financial losses and severe and irreparable harm to their lives" because they will lose "all of their various federal civil service protections and benefits, including retirement benefits" when their jobs are outsourced, the lawyers argued. "What's perhaps the most grievous of all is that we've got people within a few months, a few weeks, a few years of their federal retirements, and they're going to lose it," Day said.

Lawyers for both sides have agreed that the judge should hold a hearing on the preliminary injunction by early September, Day said. No date has been set for a hearing on the case itself, in which 834 federal flight service employees over the age of 40 allege that FAA officials targeted their jobs for a public-private competition because the bulk of them were nearing retirement age.

The outsourcing decision violates the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act because older employees will be disproportionately affected, Day and Gebhardt argued.

FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown declined to comment on the request for a preliminary injunction, saying she could not discuss ongoing litigation.

But the FAA is "fully prepared to take every action necessary to [transfer] the service to Lockheed Martin," Brown said. "In fact, almost everything is already in place."

Lockheed Martin plans to use existing buildings and equipment at first, Brown said, so "no change was required there." The workforce will remain similar as well because the vast majority of federal flight service specialists already have accepted jobs with Lockheed, Brown said. The company has hired more specialists "than were determined to be necessary to run the system," she said.

The age discrimination case is one of several lawsuits filed in the aftermath of Lockheed's win. The agency recently rejected bid protests filed by two officials representing the flight service employees.