AECOM is arbitrating an age discrimination lawsuit by George J. “Jay” Badame Jr., the former president of AECOM’s construction management unit who had joined the company after decades with New York City construction manager Tishman, which was acquired in 2010.
Filed in state court in early 2024, Badame’s lawsuit is unusual in that it involves a prominent unit executive and his clash with AECOM CEO Troy Rudd. But it’s not the only age discrimination lawsuit filed in recent years against prominent construction-related employers.
Older staff members who left or were shown the door at engineering firm HNTB and architecture firm Gehry Partners have also filed age discrimination lawsuits. In these and other recent cases reviewed by ENR, employees based their claims of unlawful discrimination on different types of evidence, including what was seen and heard in the office, changed work assignments, job evaluations and data about the ages of recently terminated staff.
The employers denied the charges and none made it to a full trial.
For employers, the cases suggest some risks related to layoffs and managing older employees.
Nicholas Frawley, a Wisconsin-based labor attorney, wrote earlier this year that employers have discretion to conduct layoffs that affect older employees, but neutrality is vital to preventing or defending age-bias claims.
“Older employees cannot be targeted in the midst of a series of layoffs,” Frawley wrote. “They may not be transferred to divisions or units more likely to be laid off, and a layoff may not be based on an employee’s eligibility for pension benefits.”
Walsh v HNTB: A ‘hostile’ performance target?
Joanne Walsh, a longtime HNTB IT staff member, was never formally fired, but launched an age discrimination lawsuit.
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He worked in the company’s Boston office helping employees with technology needs, among other tasks, for several decades, according to a decision issued in March by a federal appeals court in Boston.
According to the 2028 decision, Walsh’s new supervisor gave him a satisfactory review but noted a lack of initiative to improve his performance and said he could be given a performance improvement plan in the future. Soon her new supervisor created a plan, noting that Walsh’s performance was lacking and that her colleagues had sometimes considered her “contentious” and unwilling to push for solutions to problems.
Walsh’s IT team leader warned her that the company might replace her with “younger, cheaper people,” the ruling said. The following year, Walsh received a mixed work review, after which he said his workplace conditions deteriorated. The team leader, now his supervisor, directed harsh criticism at Walsh, who later resigned.
No one at HNTB ever told Walsh to leave, demoted her, or cut her pay. However, she sued for age discrimination in state court, alleging she was “constructively terminated” because of hostile working conditions in violation of state and federal age discrimination law.
HNTB was able to take the case to federal court and sought dismissal, noting that Walsh was never fired or demoted. Eventually, the company got the case dismissed.
The federal appeals court noted that Walsh, although a longtime and generally successful employee, was dismayed by the performance and goals review. But for his case to have merit, the appeals court ruled, he had to have shown more than “unpleasantness, hurt feelings and wounded pride.”
In employment law circles, some interpreted the result as showing that performance goals imposed by an employer do not automatically amount to a “hostile work environment.”
Minaya vs. Gehry partners: selected based on age?
Juan Minaya was hired by Gehry Partners, the prestigious architectural firm, in 2013 as a senior project architect in Los Angeles. He went to work on a Facebook project and was promoted next year to senior partner, the level just below partner. It received rave reviews for a decade, according to its complaint in Los Angeles state court. But from 2023 the atmosphere changed.
A partner informed Minaya of a large pay disparity between senior employees and younger workers, and that year he said he was pulled from a project and replaced by two staff members in their 20s.
Part of the list of employees and ages eligible for dismissal presented by plaintiff Juan Minaya in his judicial complaint. Source: Judicial file.
For the rest of the year, Minaya claims she was continually deprived of more meaningful work and was only given plan revisions to carry out. When he started in 2024, he said he noticed the company was hiring more employees in their 20s, and in June he was told he was being laid off, with four weeks’ notice, Minaya said he was told it was “just business.”
In his age discrimination lawsuit filed in July 2025, Minaya listed 39 architects employed by his firm and noted that, at age 65, he was the only one in his 60s and the only one selected for layoff.
Gehry Partners rejected the arguments, “specifically and generally denying all allegations.” Some parts of Minaya’s lawsuit also made no claims or were frivolous, the company argued.
In January, the parties reached a settlement for an undisclosed amount, court records show, and the court dismissed the case the following month.
Badame v AECOM: Linked to the financial charge?
For years, the acquisition of Tishman Construction Corp. on AECOM’s part seemed to be working out well, with Badame named president of the new parent company’s construction management unit in 2019 and signing a three-year employment contract. He provided himan annual salary of $735,000 and a global employment agreement with incentives that could bring his total annual compensation to more than $1.5 million.
An engineer with more than four decades of experience at Tishman, Badame, in videos uploaded to the Internet, reflected on his career and advised young people who want to climb the career ladder to do it “one rung at a time” to get the right experience.
Badame, in his court complaint against AECOM, said part of his success stemmed from rewarding staff through deferred/variable compensation and retention bonuses and that the incentives were built into client contracts.
But something went wrong. At the end of 2022, Badame, who was about 65 years old at the time, received a job performance rating of “developing”, which he described as “flaky” to create a future pretext to fire him.
In 2023, AECOM suddenly demoted Badame to executive advisor to the president of construction management.
In his court complaint, Badame described the demotion in part as retaliation for complaining that Rudd allegedly inflated AECOM’s profits by using funds needed to pay AECOM Tishman subcontractors and compensate its employees.
The New York City Area Chapter of the National Association of Minority Contractors recognized former AECOM executive Jay Badame in 2022.
When his employment contract expired, AECOM chose not to renew it.
After he complained about these practices, Badame charged, AECOM attempted to retaliate by targeting him along with other employees in a “systematic effort to terminate the employment of people in their sixties and seventies” and “replace them with younger staff.”
Badame and his attorney declined to comment on the arbitration.
In its response to Badame’s lawsuit in 2024, AECOM denied Badame’s “fictitious” allegations of inflating profits by withholding employee compensation, describing them as “baseless and inflammatory” efforts to “tarnish the company’s reputation.”
The company also argued that Badame’s claims about the financial remittance were intended to “create negotiating leverage in his underlying dispute over the termination of his employment by the company for legitimate business reasons.”
After months of arguments in court, AECOM’s lawyers forced Badame into arbitration as provided in his employment contract. In response to an inquiry from ENR, the company issued a statement saying it is “committed to treating employees with dignity, respect and fairness, and we do not tolerate unlawful discrimination or harassment, including on the basis of age.”.”
