WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court made it easier yesterday for any worker over 40 to allege age discrimination, ruling that employers can be held liable even if they never intended any harm.About 75 million people are covered by the decision. The ruling makes it clear that older workers will have a high threshold to prove their claims.Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that in some cases employers are within their rights to treat workers differently because of age.“Age … not uncommonly has relevance to an individual’s capacity to engage in certain types of employment,” wrote Stevens, who at 84 is the court’s oldest member.The ruling sides with older police officers in Jackson, Miss., in saying they do not have to prove that the city deliberately tried to discriminate against them, just that the policies disproportionately harmed them. Nevertheless, the high court dismissed the suit, saying officers did not demonstrate that.The ruling means that older workers now have less of a burden to raise their claim in court when suing under federal law, although ultimately it may still be hard for them to win.The decision was unanimous in dismissing the police officers’ suit, but 5-3 in holding that such suits are permitted under age-discrimination laws. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist did not participate in the decision, which was heard in November when he was being treated to thyroid cancer.“This is a major boost for the fight to eliminate age discrimination in the workplace. Evidence that an employer is intentionally out to get older workers is very hard to come by,” said Laurie McCann, senior attorney for AARP.The Supreme Court already has said the so-called disparate impact claims are allowed under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bans discrimination based on sex, religion or race. On Yesterday, justices said it should be no different for age discrimination, although it ruled the scope of liability is narrower.At issue was workplace polices that appear neutral but actually disproportionately hurt older workers. Advocates for the aging say few employers would ever be up front about intentionally favoring younger workers, making age bias claims hard to win absent the rare “smoking gun.”Employers say allowing disparate impact claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act would hinder their ability to make necessary decisions based on age-neutral factors, such as training or performance, even if the impact happens to be greater on older workers.The ruling in some ways strikes a compromise between the two.It allows older workers to make a disparate impact claim under the ADEA regardless of intent; but at the same time, it permits an employer to cite “reasonable” factors, such as cost-cutting, to justify a practice that penalizes older workers so it prevails at trial.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed that the police officers’ suit should be dismissed but argued that ADEA bars disparate impact claims. She said Congress never intended such lawsuits because employers should have flexibility to make business decisions that might unintentionally hurt older workers.Because older workers tend to be longtime employees with higher pay and more benefits, a business might inadvertently violate the law when it cuts expenses, even if no ill intent was involved, O’Connor noted. Her concurrence was joined by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.“There often is a correlation between an individual’s age and her ability to perform her job,” O’Connor wrote. “That is to be expected, for physical ability generally declines with age, and in some cases, so does mental capacity.”The work-force is steadily aging, and the government predicts that by 2010, more than half of all workers are expected to be 40 or older.Despite the aging trend, lawyers say employers often have economic incentives to weed out older workers. That’s because longtime employees may have higher medical bills and have locked in more expensive salary and benefit agreements.In the Mississippi case, 30 officers and dispatchers sued over a pay performance plan they said gave substantially larger pay raises to employees with five or fewer years of tenure; as a result, that had an unfavorable impact on employees 40 and over.The lower courts threw out the suit, reasoning that disparate impact claims were barred.In its ruling yesterday, the Supreme Court said that while police officers can get into court to show unfavorable impact, they failed to do so here. It said the city’s explanation that it was trying to make salaries for junior officers more competitive with similar positions was “reasonable.”“The city’s decision to grant a larger raise to lower echelon employees for the purpose of bringing salaries in line with that of surrounding police forces was a decision based on a ‘reasonable factor other than age’ that responded to the city’s legitimate goal of retaining police officers,” Stevens wrote.