GM lawsuit claims forced ranking system targets older workers for termination

Khan was hired in February 2001 as a Supplier Quality Engineer and worked his way up to Senior Performance Engineer in Recall Safety, the filing says. The complaint says his reviews stayed at “meets” or “exceeds expectations” for most of his career, and he received his most recent merit raise in April 2024. 

Trouble started in 2018, the complaint alleges. Khan says his manager, Field Action Execution Manager Daniel Stec, sent him images of a “monkey humping a football” in reference to Khan and other employees of color, and used a racial slur when discussing a Black GM employee. Khan says he objected directly, then escalated to HR. 

What followed, according to the filing, was a pattern of retaliation. Khan alleges Stec hyper-focused on his attendance, denied his work-from-home requests while granting them to others, and screamed at him in front of colleagues. After Khan threatened to file an EEOC charge, the complaint says Stec’s supervisor, Mark Pohl, stepped in, reviewed the data, and pulled back a proposed performance improvement plan. Khan returned to work and, the complaint says, continued to score well on quantitative reviews for the next few years. 

The case turns on what the complaint says happened in 2024. According to the filing, GM named Arden Hoffman as Chief People Officer in October 2022, and in 2024 Hoffman rolled out a new performance management philosophy built around forced ranking – tiering employees and targeting the bottom group for termination. 

Khan alleges, “based on information and belief,” that supervising managers and executives were told by HR leadership the goal was to cut GM’s white-collar workforce by 10% annually through performance management. According to the filing, the motivation was “the desire to create room to hire younger employees” across the company, including in Field Action Execution. The complaint says the system pushed managers to document performance shortcomings as often as possible, with as many subordinates as possible.