Morrison v. Rose

Background

Cynthia R. Morrison, who represented herself, sued the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) and DHS employees Sara Rose, Jenny Rennquist, and Michael E. Anderson. She alleged that DHS did not reclassify her position or properly compensate her, excluded her from workplace communications and opportunities, changed her job description, and gave her negative evaluations after protected activity.

Morrison asserted four claims: age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA); an ADEA hostile-work-environment claim; ADEA retaliation; and unequal pay under the Equal Pay Act and the ADEA. In her response to the motion to dismiss, she clarified that she was not pursuing the race-discrimination claim checked on her original form and that her unequal-pay claim was based on the ADEA rather than the Equal Pay Act.

Original Complaint

The court applied the standard for a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Under that standard, a complaint must include enough factual content to make liability plausible, although a self-represented complaint receives a liberal reading. The court nevertheless explained that a self-represented plaintiff must allege enough facts to support the claims.

The court first found that the original complaint did not attribute any challenged action to any particular defendant. Although it listed the defendants, its factual allegations did not mention their involvement. The court stated that this lack alone supported dismissal.

The court also held that the ADEA claims failed to the extent Morrison sought individual liability against Rose, Rennquist, and Anderson. It found that the ADEA imposes liability on employers, not employees in their individual capacities. Because the complaint did not specify whether the individual defendants were sued individually or officially, the court treated the claims against them as official-capacity claims at this stage rather than dismissing them as duplicative of the claims against DHS.

On the age-discrimination claim, the court found that Morrison alleged she was over forty and that her job was not reclassified and that she was paid less than other employees. But she did not connect those actions to her age or identify the ages of the other employees. The court therefore found the claim implausible.

The hostile-work-environment claim also failed because the complaint did not allege facts tying the alleged exclusion, job-documentation problems, or changes to her duties to her age.

For retaliation, the court found that Morrison’s complaints about her job description, reclassification request, and position review did not allege opposition to age discrimination. Those complaints therefore were not protected activity under the ADEA. The court recognized that filing a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was protected activity, but found that the complaint did not plausibly connect that charge to the alleged retaliation. Some alleged actions occurred before the charge, the November 2025 action occurred more than a year later, and other allegations lacked sufficiently specific timing.

The court treated the ADEA portion of the unequal-pay claim as duplicative of the age-discrimination claim and dismissed it for the same reasons. It understood Morrison to have abandoned the Equal Pay Act portion of that claim.

Proposed Amended Complaint

Morrison sought permission to file a proposed amended complaint after the deadline for amending as a matter of course. The proposed amendment added details about her employment, the roles of the individual defendants, and alleged younger employees who were paid more or hired into positions for which she had applied. It also included a chart listing eight comparators, each allegedly earning $35,000 more per year, and clarified that the individual defendants were sued only in their official capacities. The proposed complaint omitted the Equal Pay Act claim.

The court found the proposed age-discrimination claim futile, meaning it still could not survive a motion to dismiss. The alleged comparators held different positions from Morrison, and the proposed complaint did not allege that she applied for the position held by the listed younger employees. Its general references to younger employees did not provide enough information to show that they were similarly situated in the relevant respects.

The proposed hostile-work-environment claim remained largely unchanged and still did not connect the alleged conduct to Morrison’s age. The proposed complaint instead appeared to describe retaliation for requesting job reclassification, not harassment because of age.

The proposed retaliation claim also remained insufficient. Morrison relied on the timing of her Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charge and later actions, but the proposed complaint did not add facts establishing a close enough timing connection. The court found that the November 2025 change to her position description occurred nine months after she amended her charge, and the start date for other alleged exclusions was unclear.

Disposition

Judge Eric C. Tostrud ordered that the defendants’ motion to dismiss was GRANTED, Morrison’s motion to amend was DENIED, and the action was DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE. The court directed that judgment be entered accordingly.