Settlement Agreement page 3 of 5

The $5,000 in settlement money came from my former agency last week. That was one of the last things opposing counsel and I worked out in our five months of negotiations last spring and summer. Below is page 3 of 5 of the Settlement Agreement entered more than two years after my bogus low review of Satisfactory in August 2015, and more than a year after my involuntary retirement in May 2016, forced by what I perceived to be a a hostile work environment abetted by retaliation. The third (of four) settling points is "the FTC will pay Mr. Lamberton five thousand dollars ($5,000)" in January 2018.

I have been asked why I settled for so "little" money when what I was really was deprived of by my involuntary retirement, forced by what I perceived to be a hostile work environment brimming with nepotism, imbued with discrimination and abetted by retaliation, was a well-paying job which I was good at. That represented an actual loss of much more money than $5,000. But it was never about the money, rather, it was about what I left behind me, what my imprint was after more than 25 years of outstanding work in my 2d career. That discussion will come tomorrow when we look at the 4th settling point, on page 4 of 5. The first of three drafts I was presented with had much of what I perceived to be necessary; but it lacked money. I said there had to be money (the agency had to put skin into the game), and there was a money offer in the second draft. I said the money offer was too low. In the third draft the money offer was sweetened a little bit, and I finalized that draft by executing it because it had everything that I thought was necessary to justify my actions in filing my complaint, and in leaving when I did, and to try to put my former agency back on a fair footing for all the staff members who were still there, especially those at risk solely because of their age, and those who would follow.

The very 1st settling point is that "the FTC will issue Mr. Lamberton a performance appraisal, reflecting an overall "Outstanding" rating for the 2014-2015 rating period." This is as it should have been all along. My most influential manager, who used to call me The Closer and put me on cases where important and difficult settlement negotiations were happening or imminent, not only to settle the matter but also to teach inexperienced attorneys some of the various techniques of effective settlement. For instance, in the line of important and ground-breaking Auto Recall cases that I was a part of for the year that I received a sub-standard review, I am proud that I negotiated a favorable settlement for my former agency with one of the largest car dealers in the country which was represented by the former Associate Director of the division I worked for, who was legendary throughout the agency for his absolute mastery of the law and thorough knowledge of the agency and what it had done in the past on similar cases, and in addition he was a brilliant interlocutor. After my bogus review at the end of the affected rating period, I would have settled with that manager for just one more point in the rating formula (change just one of the three Satisfactory categories to Commendable, which certainly wouldn't have been a "gift," especially in light of my subsequent award). That alone would have changed my overall  Satisfactory rating to Commendable. Because I am reasonable, and my job and my paycheck would have tempered my pride and my notions of justice, we could have effected that compromise. But she was inflexible, or perhaps covering up or trying to shut me up, so once I no longer had a job, I had nothing to lose, really, and I negotiated exactly what I needed and could realistically achieve in pursuit of justification for me and fair play for those following.

The 2d of the 4 settling points was that I received "a Superior Service Certificate as an honorary performance award." This wasn't worth my job, and my receipt of it wouldn't necessarily change the management culture in my former division much less in my former agency, but it was nice to receive as an afterthought.

Page one of five of the Settlement Agreement

A lot happened during the two years between my sub-standard personnel review of Satisfactory (less than Commendable and much less than Outstanding, which are the commonplace evaluations) that I thought was based upon age discrimination, and the Settlement I signed after about 5 months of negotiations with the GC's office at my former agency. Below is page one of that 5-page agreement, which basically covers the findings of fact. There's a formula to ratings, and I was one single point away from a Commendable rating in these highly subjective, carefully crafted and reverse engineered evaluations. I would still have disagreed with a Commendable but I wouldn't have informally complained about it because I was a go-along guy in the division, I know how subjective these evaluations are, and realize that managers protect their pets with elevated ratings. But the Satisfactory (barely above Minimally Acceptable) assigned to me was outrageously and pointedly low, unjustified, and I felt I was being singled out due to my age plus I was nobody's pet and all of my managers were a full generation younger than me. So I followed the avenues laid out as necessary for redress in the Administrative Manual, which processes are mostly a huge stall tactic in my opinion. I went and discussed the improperly low evaluation informally with the manager who gave it to me and asked her to change it after giving her my reasons. She smilingly said No. I filed a grievance, which was a waste of time because it was ruled upon by one of the very managers who signed the very evaluation I was complaining about. There was no recourse or oversight to the disparaging, and wrong, opinion he wrote. That left only the informal complaint process to the HR office, based upon my assertion of ageism in my evaluation, which had months in which to try to reach a resolution before I could file a Formal Complaint.

Below is a closer look at the top of page 1, the Findings of Fact agreed to by the two parties to the Settlement Agreement. To continue my tale about the time-suck that complainants about ageism and other improprieties at federal agencies run into is that my improperly low evaluation was done on August 26, 2015. The informal complaint I filed with the agency's HR office about it, based on age discrimination, went to December with no discernible progress at all. Then the HR office negotiator in effect threw up her hands and said sorry, they (the tightly banded-together four managers) won't budge, there's nothing I can do. I was given my options, to either let it go or file a Formal Complaint with the agency's HR office, which would then be investigated over the course of six more months. I chose to do the latter, but I still wasn't any closer to an actual resolution in front of an impartial arbiter (a court, you know) as 2015 slipped into 2016. But the formal complaint process did carry with it assurances that I would not be subjected to retaliation because, or perhaps only during the pendency, of my formal complaint. This assurance sounded very high-minded.

Below is a close-up of the text of page one of the settlement. The negotiations included the exchange of three drafts of the final agreement, which were always crafted by the GC's office at my former agency, after extended discussions. This page incorporates our agreed to findings of fact, including the fact that "On May 27, 2016, Mr. Lamberton amended his formal complaint with additional allegations of a hostile work environment, which culminated in his involuntary retirement in May 2016." That's how it was, I felt that I was retaliated against at the end of May during the pendency of the investigation into my Formal Complaint by a manager who in my opinion had engaged in retaliation before. I felt compelled to retire suddenly on Memorial Day in 2016 rather than to continue in a hostile work environment such as I was apparently in. My involuntary retirement had definite drawbacks. My income was suddenly and immediately slashed by well over 80%, ruining all my financial plans for the future. The further allegations of retaliation near the end of the original six-month investigation into my formal complaint of ageism added another six months to the investigation. There hadn't been a single word of credible settlement discussion so far.

At this point, it had been about nine months since my complained-about evaluation. Notably, in the fall of 2015 I received a team award for my work in the important auto-recall line of cases. The receipt of this award had obviously not been taken into consideration during my evaluation in August, which lacked one single point of pushing my rating from the sub-standard Satisfactory rating to the more acceptable and commonplace (but still too low) Commendable rating. I believed that this subsequent award for notable and significant work I had done during the same exact period that the evaluation had covered was exactly the later-surfacing evidence that would improve my rating, obviously. Or was this award that everyone on the team received, signifying all of our excellent work in this fully successful and ground-breaking field, merely a feel-good fillip that means nothing? I think that the rest of that excellent team would dispute that, and I was not a dog amongst thoroughbreds on it. But the reaction of the management team responsible for my unjustifiably low evaluation to this newly uncovered and hitherto unknown evidence in my favor was nil. So now I was prematurely out of a job, with a pint-sized horse statue, the symbol of my former agency, as my supposed full reward for a quarter-century of dedicated and excellent work, along with a left-behind bogus Satisfactory final rating.

The year in review, part 2 of 3.

At the end of May, after more than a quarter century on the job and after working hard all year doing more with less as people at work left to take new jobs or went out on maternity leave, I was suddenly forced to retire by the impossible demands of, in my opinion, a bullying manager acting as the point man for a group of in-it-for-themselves managers a generation younger.  I already had an active age-discrimination complaint going at the time but these people consider themselves to be bullet-proof and, in my opinion, do whatever they want, paying only lip service to rules put in place about retaliation and the like.

On the day after I was precipitously and prematurely forced to retire due to ageism, I bought new running shoes and ran five times a week during the month of June, mostly around Northern Virginia and sometimes in the District, taking on the task of running home from all of the furthest-out Silver Line Metro stops.  I also discovered from a neighbor that my youngest son had gotten married a year earlier to some girl named Laura.

In July I kept active by continuing running five times a week, sometimes in the District with friends from my former place of work.  I also did some hiking and bicycling on some of the many recreational venues available around the District, like here on the C&O Canal Towpath.

August was a most interesting month.  On the eleventh, out of the clear blue sky, I got friended and then unfriended within the hour by my daughter-in-law Laura, and then the next morning I underwent stomach surgery, which put me down harder and longer than I thought it would.

Our lives were about to change.

When I'm 64...

The Beatles sang about it on their Sgt. Peppers album in the song, When I'm 64.  "Will you still need me?"

In the case of my job, the answer came down unmistakably, a month after the fact, from a manager either acting on his own or in tandem with the rest of the managers in my shop, in the form of an, uh, in-person communication from him that indelibly said, "No."  So last month I retired rather than report to an increasingly hostile and untenable work environment each workday.

After more than 25 years of outstanding service, it's a shame.  But that's the way the game is played these days, whether it's legal or illegal, by mid-level managers fighting to advance their careers above all else, when dealing with workers a generation apart from them.

The above is only my opinion, of course.  This particular manager announced shortly after I left that he was leaving to take a job elsewhere.

He'd been there 7 years, the last 3 as a manager, and he didn't want to "calcify," he reportedly said.  He needed new challenges.

In my opinion, he had way too much recent baggage to stay, being the chief henchman in driving out workers two decades older than he.  His fingerprints were all over two of the three sexagenarians in my former shop being forced to leave in the last year due to age discrimination, one via a forced transfer and in my case, a precipitous retirement.

He certainly never met the challenge of being an effective manager.  In my opinion, it was management by bullying.

I've been runnin'

I've got the card reader in the Mac, some time on my hands and I'm ready to upload!  Yeah, I been running' this year.

I run 5 times a week.  The mileage isn't important, the number of days running is.

Five times.  In the late spring, when I was still working (being overworked), my weight ballooned to 195 as my run days were cut down to two days a week because of the unrealistic demands at work (do more with less and we [a new generation of management] will advance ruthlessly on your back).

Now that I'm no longer working (yeah, I'm pointing directly at you Chris), I run five times each week.  My pre-run weight has settled into the high 170s.