Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, May 27, 1995                   TAG: 9505300049
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

EX-WORKERS SUE DUPONT FOR 'AGEISM'

Company officials said they had not evaluated the lawsuit and had no comment on it.

The action against DuPont concerns a massive downsizing that followed a company announcement in the fall of 1993 that nearly 700 of the 1,300 Martinsville workers would lose their jobs through layoffs or attrition.

The suit, in U.S. District Court in Delaware, where DuPont is based, said cross-training rules proposed in the fall of 1993 would have required Martinsville employees to master a spinning machine to keep their jobs.

Union officials at the time denounced the rule as a scheme to move older workers out of their jobs, because spinning machine operators need good eyesight to see tiny threads and were required to do heavy lifting, the suit said.

Although the suit said the plan was never implemented, it appeared to workers who could not run the machine that they would have little choice but to quit and collect severance pay and lifetime medical coverage, or else they would have been fired, the suit said.

As it turned out, the nearly 600 employees who resigned lost a portion of their pension benefits, which are calculated based on years of service to the company, said Kenneth Henley, a Philadelphia-area lawyer who is part of the employees' legal team. The recovery of those benefits and lost wages are two chief aims of the suit, Henley said. No specific amount was requested at this stage.

Henley said the company preferred to force employees to resign rather than ordering layoffs. Seniority rules would have subjected the most recently hired workers to layoff, leaving DuPont with a work force made up largely of high-wage senior workers eligible for maximum vacation leave and pensions, Henley said.

The union leaders who first objected to the spinning machine requirement were later voted out of office. Earlier this year, they formed an unofficial union affiliated with the United Mine Workers and organized meetings at which 170 former employees talked with lawyers and decided to take the case to court, Henley said.

A union news release said the plaintiffs will seek to have the case declared a class action open to the nearly 600 employees who resigned.