Derek Mobley lost an IT job in 2017 and then did what everyone tells you to do. He applied. By his account he sent more than 100 applications through employers running the same recruiting platform, and the rejections came back without a single interview, some of them in the small hours within an hour of his hitting submit, including for roles he was already doing as a contractor. He is one man, over 40, and he could not get a person on the phone. The platform he was applying into, Workday, processed roughly 1.1 billion applications over the period now at issue in his case, according to court filings. One man against a billion decisions. That is the shape of the thing.
On March 6, 2026, a federal judge in the Northern District of California refused to throw his case out. Judge Rita Lin denied Workday's motion to dismiss the age claims and let the collective action for applicants 40 and older go forward, holding again that job applicants, not just people already employed, can bring what the law calls a disparate-impact claim, the argument that a neutral-looking rule can still break the law if it lands unequally on a protected group. Read that carefully, because the distinction matters and the headlines will blur it. A denied motion to dismiss is not a finding that anyone broke the law. It means the allegation is serious enough to be tested rather than thrown out. Workday has been found liable for nothing. What the court decided is that the question deserves a trial.
The question is whether a screen can inherit a prejudice. Mobley filed in February 2023, alleging that Workday's AI-driven applicant tools, including HiredScore technology folded into the platform, sort candidates in a way that lands harder on older workers, and on Black applicants, and on people with disabilities. The pivotal ruling actually came earlier. In July 2024 the same judge refused to dismiss the case on Workday's theory that a software vendor sits outside the anti-discrimination laws altogether. She held the company could be liable as an agent of the employers who use it, and wrote that "drawing an artificial distinction between software decisionmakers and human decisionmakers would potentially gut anti-discrimination laws in the modern era." That 2024 order was also where the court held, as another judge in the district already had, that applicants, not only employees, could bring age disparate-impact claims. The March 2026 order reaffirmed that point over Workday's renewed objection, while trimming some California state-law claims and one plaintiff's disability claim. So there are two rulings here, a year and a half apart, and they do different jobs: 2024 said a software company can be on the hook, 2026 said the case survives to be argued.
Here is what should give any working reader pause. In May 2025 the court conditionally certified a nationwide collective of applicants 40 and up, and when the window to join closed on March 7 of this year, by one account roughly 14,000 people had opted in, a figure Workday declined to confirm. Fourteen thousand is not a movement. Against 1.1 billion applications it is a rounding error, the few who happened to hear that the door was open. The rest never knew there was a case, because they never knew why they were passed over. That is the quiet cruelty of an automated screen: it does not send you a reason. You just stop hearing back.
Workday's answer has been consistent, and it deserves to be stated in the company's own words. In response to the March ruling a spokesperson said: "Our products, both AI-enabled and not, are built to help our customers manage an ever-increasing volume of applicants with a focus on human decision-making. Workday's AI recruiting tools are not trained to use, or even identify, protected characteristics like race, age, or disability. We'll continue to defend ourselves vigorously in court." Keep the human decision-making in mind. The court had already allowed the case to go forward in 2024 on the allegation that the software does more than store data, that it recommends which candidates advance and which do not. When the recommendation arrives before a person has looked, the human in the loop is looking at a list someone else already cut.
The fight in front of Judge Lin turned on something almost absurdly narrow, and that narrowness is the story. Workday argued that because Congress had tried and failed to amend the age law to explicitly cover applicants, applicants must not be covered. AARP and the AARP Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief arguing the opposite, that the agency charged with enforcing the law has read it to protect applicants since months after it passed, and that automated screening cannot be allowed to become a back door around a statute written in 1967. The judge agreed with that reading. So the live legal question in 2026 was, in effect, whether a 60-year-old law protects a 60-year-old who applies for a job. We are relitigating whether the door counts.
None of this is settled ground, and it would be dishonest to pretend the wind is at the plaintiffs' backs. In April 2025 the administration issued an executive order directing federal agencies to stop enforcing disparate-impact claims, the exact theory Mobley is built on, with the stated aim of eliminating that liability "in all contexts to the maximum degree possible." The doctrine that says a neutral-looking rule can still be illegal if it lands unequally is being pulled up by the roots at the federal level even as this case leans on it. So an over-50 applicant is caught between a screen that will not explain itself and a legal shield that is being quietly lowered.
Now turn to the survey that landed the same season, because it tells you the machine did not invent the bias, it only scaled it. AARP polled 1,656 workers over 50 last summer and published the results in January. 64 percent said they had seen or experienced age discrimination at work, a number that has not moved since 2024. More than one in five, 22 percent, feel they are being pushed out of a job because of their age. The single most common form of it, reported by a third of respondents, is the assumption that older workers are not tech savvy. Sit with that one. The prejudice a person carries into an interview and the logic a model learns from a decade of who got hired can be the same prejudice, wearing different clothes.
And the not-tech-savvy line is a lie on its own terms. An AARP and LinkedIn analysis found that over five years the number of workers over 50 who list technologies like AI among their skills rose 25 percent, nearly double the growth rate for younger workers. "This is the one discrimination that we all will go through," Carly Roszkowski of AARP said of the survey findings. "We are all aging." It is the rare bias with no out-group. Everyone ages into it or dies first.
So ask the three questions I ask of everything. Who benefits: the employer who can pour a billion applications through a funnel for the price of a license. Who carries the risk: the applicant over 50 who is filtered out overnight and told nothing, who cannot appeal a decision she cannot see. Who gets to leave: no one. You cannot quit being 54. The tidy version of this story ends with advice, tune your resume for the robots, sprinkle in the keywords, beat the screen at its own game. I will not write that ending, because it puts the fix back on the worker and lets the system off. The fix Mobley is reaching for is not a better resume. It is the right to know why the door closed, and someone to answer for it when it closed on the wrong grounds. The autumn hiring season is nearly on us. Most of the people about to be sorted will never learn they were sorted. That is the part the law is only starting to catch up to, and the part worth being angry about.
