The Baltimore EEOC District Office recently settled an ADEA suit alleging that the defendants the Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education (Paul Hall) of Piney Point, Maryland and the Seafarers' International Union (SIU) of Camp Springs, Maryland discouraged individuals age 40 and above from applying for, and denied them admission to, their seafarers' apprenticeship program. Paul Hall operates an apprenticeship program for deep sea merchant seafarers and inland waterways boatmen. Graduates of the program become eligible for membership in the SIU, which places many of them with cooperating shipper-employers. The SIU and employers who hire seafarers provide financial support to applicants accepted into the program. Beginning in July 2000, charging party (at age 40 and again at 41) requested information about the seafarers' apprenticeship program from the SIU website but never received a response. At the time, one of the eligibility criteria for admission was being "between the ages of 18 through 25." Application requests from a number of individuals in the protected age group were marked "too old." After defendants dropped the age limit from the application form, they continued to exclude applicants in the protected age group.

The lawsuit was resolved through a 5-year consent decree that followed defendants' unsuccessful interlocutory appeal to the Fourth Circuit challenging EEOC's 1996 regulation extending the age discrimination prohibitions of the ADEA to all apprenticeship programs. On January 7, 2005, the appeals court ruled that EEOC's regulation was a valid exercise of the agency's rulemaking authority. Under the decree, the defendants will pay aggrieved individuals identified by the EEOC (including charging party) $625,000 in compensation for wages which they purportedly would have earned from shipboard jobs had the apprenticeship training program been available to them. The decree enjoins defendants from imposing any upper age limit in recruiting applicants for or admitting applicants to the apprenticeship program. It also enjoins defendants from discriminating based on age (40 or older) against individuals who inquire about the program, apply for the program, or are enrolled in the program. In all written and electronic recruiting and admissions materials for the seafarers' apprenticeship program, defendants will state that they do not discriminate on the basis of age in recruiting for or admitting applicants into the program.

EEOC v. Paul Hall Center for Maritime Training and Education and Seafarers International Union (D. Md. Nov. 14, 2005)