Melman v. Montefiore Med. Ctr. (Summary)

AGE DISCRIMINATION

Melman v. Montefiore Med. Ctr., 2012 N.Y. Slip Op. 04111 (N.Y. App. Div. May 29, 2012)

The Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York affirmed a grant of summary judgment in favor of a medical center on a urologist’s age discrimination and retaliation claims.  The urologist claimed that the medical center discriminated against him on the basis of age and retaliated against him for objecting to the discrimination, which allegedly included unreasonably low compensation, compensation lower than that of subordinates, limiting his control as chairman of the department, and otherwise treating him with disrespect.

However, the court affirmed summary judgment on the age discrimination claim under two different burden frameworks.  First, it found that only one of the urologist’s subordinates had been paid higher than him, and that this was only due to the subordinate’s unique skills in performing robotic prostate surgery and his threatening to leave if he was not given a raise.  Second, as to the reasonableness of the urologist’s compensation, it found that even before he claimed to have been discriminated against, the hospital had detailed some performance deficiencies in the urologist’s practice which went into calculating his compensation and that these documented performance deficiencies amounted to sufficient non-discriminatory reasons for the amount of compensation.  And, it ultimately concluded that it “should not sit as a super-personnel department that reexamines an entity’s business decisions,” that a challenge of the “correctness” of an employer’s decision, without more, does not indicate discrimination, and that perceived slights or mere personality conflicts do not constitute discrimination.

The court rejected the retaliation claim as well finding that the actions complained of after he objected to the alleged discrimination were merely a continuation of the same practices that he complained of as evidence of discrimination in the first instance.  It also found that the urologist’s allegations that he had been retaliated against through the president of the medical center’s “refusal” to talk to him and the medical center’s failure to ask him to sit on various unspecified committees “[a]t most,…alleged that his charge of discrimination and subsequent lawsuit caused his personal relationship with [] administrators to deteriorate.  As a matter of common sense, this sort of breakdown in personal relations is inevitable once a serious lawsuit has been commenced.” In affirming the grant for summary judgment, it concluded that it “[saw] no justification for allowing this meritless lawsuit to continue to divert [the medical center’s] limited resources” from its true mission.