A senior engineer who spent 27 years at General Motors with promotions — but fired in January — is suing the company amid allegations that a recently adopted employee evaluation program is designed to eliminate older salaried workers.
Tuan Le, 58, of Ortonville, Michigan, is the third GM employee represented by Michael Pitt of Royal Oak to file a legal claim that the company’s so-called “forced ranking” evaluation system (also known as “stacked ranking”) requires managers to meet job-elimination quotas that unfairly and illegally punish senior employees.
Le is alleging retaliation for speaking up within the company too, according to the lawsuit filed in Wayne County Circuit Court on Wednesday, August 19.
GM spokesman Kevin Kelly declined to comment to Shifting Gears.
The forced ranking system is legendary in legal circles, having been abandoned by companies after a litany of lawsuits brought by employees and the AARP.
Pitt also represented plaintiffs who sued Ford Motor Co. in 2001. The company, then led by CEO Jacques Nasser, settled the class action claims for $10.5 million without admitting wrongdoing. Ford stopped using the grading process implemented in 2000.
Meanwhile, GM began using the program in 2024.
“Leaders will be expected to own this change — including explaining what we are doing, and why it is important for GM and its future,” according to an internal general memo obtained by Shifting Gears and dated August 28, 2024. “This document is intended for People Leaders only. Please DO NOT share.”
How it works
A certain portion of GM workers must be put in the “Does Not Meet Expectations” category. Job cut quotas must be met by managers. Period.
Leaders are required to designate 15% of its staff in the ‘Does Not Meet Expectations’ category or ‘Partially Meets Expectations category,” Pitt told Shifting Gears. “This system is uniformly disliked by managers. We have statistics that older employees are disproportionately rated negatively and younger employees are disproportionately rated positively. This policy is biased against older people.”
‘A corrupt process’
At issue, according to the lawsuit, is that GM managers are told they must meet job-cutting quotas that identify non-performing workers whether or not they are fulfilling performance expectations.
“I’ve got documents where they were actually keeping scores, so as the group leaders go through evaluations, the HR people are saying, ‘You’ve got 800 people, 40 of your people have to come in as ‘Do Not Meet’ because that’s 5%. If you’ve identified 25, you have to find 15 more. It’s no longer how a person is performing. If the manager doesn’t find somebody, then they’re in trouble. It’s not just an artificial process. I’d go so far as to say it’s a corrupt process.”
In March 2025 and July 2025, Le received a “Partially Meets” evaluation after almost 25 years of positive performance evaluations. Then he “spoke out publicly (via email) about GM’s adoption of a discriminatory performance review system,” according to the lawsuit obtained by Shifting Gears.
On July 8, 2025, Le emailed his Global Propulsion Systems Manufacturing Engineering Group of approximately 800 workers and noted that the GM system was similar to the process Ford used that led to lawsuits and abandonment of the system.
‘Disastrous’
Le included in his group email links to news articles from Forbes, Newsweek, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and CBS News, discussing fallout from the “disastrous ranking system for employees at Ford,” according to the lawsuit.
“I may just have my badge revoked and not able to enter any GM facilities tomorrow with this email so it’s been nice to know and work with/for some of you,” Le sent to GM colleagues at 6:44 p.m. “Live long enough and you’re bound to see history repeats itself. Surely, there are others here beside me who remember Jac ‘The Knife’ Nasser.”
Le received favorable reactions from his colleagues almost immediately, the lawsuit says. Le’s manager (Shenita McCants Jenkins) sent an email to employees in her group asking them not to respond to Le’s email, the lawsuit said.
On July 23, 2025, Le was “summoned” to a virtual meeting with Hilger, McCants Jenkins and HR representative Tiffany Brigman.
“GM’s Human Resources department reacted to the email by informing Le that he had two choices: accept a Plan for Improvement (PFI) to be completed in 30 days or take a severance and leave the company,” the lawsuit says. “Le accepted the PFI and satisfactorily completed all of its requirements but was told he could not regress to old behavior.”
Despite his compliance, GM terminated Le on January 17, 2026.
He went from working as an industrial engineer in 1999, analyzing work contents to develop processes and balancing work centers for new launches as well as current production, through a series of promotions — senior industrial engineer, then senior manufacturing engineer who first worked on budgets and forecast reports then creating simulation models to assist new programs and existing programs.
Lost a $120,000 job
From 1999 through 2023, Le was rated as “Achieves” or higher and based on his supervisor’s opinion of performance received 100% or more of his bonus payout, the lawsuits says.
Le’s last annual salary was $120,000 and he was eligible for bonuses and other benefits.
According to an internal GM bulletin reviewed by Shifting Gears, GM moved from a 3- to 5-point performance rating scale.
Significantly Exceeds Expectations: 5% of the organization (150% target bonus payout)
Exceeds Expectations: 10% of the organization (125% target bonus payout)
Achieves Expectations: 70% of the organization (100% target bonus payout)
Partially Meets Expectations: 10% (50% target bonus payout)
Does Not Meet Expectations: 5% (0% target bonus payout)
‘Fighting and back stabbing’
The lawsuit also details the role of “people leaders,” often known as team leaders, and how they critique their workers in this forced ranking process.
Preliminary employee ratings are suggested by each employee’s people leader,” the lawsuit says. “Group leaders meet in what is described as a ‘Calibration Session’ whereby the preliminary employee ratings set by each employee’s direct people leader are considered and adjusted up or down or unchanged by the higher group leaders. It is at this point in the process where much of the age discrimination occurs.”
An engineer missing a timeline goal because a supplier couldn’t build and deliver equipment due to a material shortage could be cited for missing the deadline without essential context, the lawsuit says. “During the Calibration Session, performance ratings are often assigned to employees under consideration on the basis of hearsay and highly subjective opinions expressed by session participants who do not have firsthand experience with the employees or the situations.”
In the lawsuit, Le said “supervisor Dave Hilger communicated to Le and others in their group that there is ‘a lot of fighting and backstabbing’ in the calibration process because managers wanted to keep the rating for their own employees elevated due to the bottom 15% being forced on them … Hilger advised Le that ‘sometimes supervisors can give their direct reports a different grade than the final grade after calibration session with higher mangers/directors.’ Hilger advised Le that he and other supervisors thought the new performance review system was unfair and in their meeting with Human Resources so expressed their displeasure with the new system.”
Le, a senior throughput simulation engineer, said this relatively new performance review protocol has changed the culture at GM. Some engineers revealed to Le that they would not teach younger or new employees everything they know just to protect their own jobs, he told Shifting Gears in an exclusive interview.
“People don’t come to work happy anymore. They walk around and wonder if they’re going to get let go, even when they’ve been doing good,” he said. “Everyone is just scared. This is more about politics and kissing up to the boss. It just reduces morale. I was hoping my email would generate discussion and maybe it would get to (CEO) Mary Barra.”
Grades range from 1 to 5 and a low scores indicates the employee is in trouble.
Pitt told Shifting Gears, “Quotas are toxic employment practices resulting in the breakdown of trust between management and employees because employees are always worried that they will be the sacrificial lamb who is dropped into the lowest 5% category.”
Le, born in Vietnam during the war, was brought by Americans to Cheboygan, Michigan, as an orphan and put in foster care.
Working at GM was a dream, Le said. He is seeking reinstatement at GM with lost wages and benefits and legal fees.
GM protocol ditched by Ford, Microsoft, Sandia
This employee review process has generated headlines for 25 years.
In July 2001, “Nasser e-mailed all Ford employees saying the system would be replaced by a more flexible evaluation system that does not require doling out the lowest grade and reducing pay,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. “‘The negative feedback has centered around what was viewed as an inflexible system by some, and as discriminatory by a few others,’ Nasser said in his e-mail.”
Its headline: “Ford scraps controversial employee grading system.”
Ford isn’t alone in getting rid of the evaluation process now under attack at GM.
Goodyear Rubber and Tire Co. dumped forced ranking in 2002 after being sued by older workers and AARP, saying the company didn’t discriminate but it was revising its evaluation system, according to The Maryland Daily Record.
Under the headline “The folly of forced rankings,” CNET reported in an analysis piece in 2002 that Sandia Corp. lost a class-action age discrimination suit in 1975 that focused on the validity of its forced distribution appraisal system. “The company lost because it couldn’t prove that the forced distributions it created led to valid measures of individual performance.”
Employees at Microsoft and Conoco sued over forced ranking systems, according to an article in The New York Times in March 2001 headlined, “Companies Turn to Grades, and Employees Go to Court.”
The job review protocol crippled innovation, critics said. A headline in The Seattle Times said in November 2013 said, “Microsoft ditches system that ranks employees against each other.” That same year, Harvard Business Review said, “Being forced to rate every single one of your team on a bell curve from excellent to poor (even if the whole team had, in fact, performed excellently) has been singled out … as one of the reasons for Microsoft’s inability to foster high-performing teams, a major cause of its ‘lost decade.’”
‘Why?’ Make it make sense
Charles Elson, founding director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, told Shifting Gears there’s nothing wrong with demanding excellence from employees but fair execution of the process is essential.
“Basing it on a percentile is not great management. The way they’re doing it creates a competition that ultimately harms morale and leads to less performance and makes GM a less attractive place to work,” he said.
The forced ranking program “is obviously a flawed system that should be rethought,” Elson said. “Using a stick to force good behavior is always wrong. You do an incentive. This program is a stick rather than a carrot.”
He can’t imagine why GM would pick up a performance review program that other companies have dumped years ago based on legal outcomes. “Why is it returning?”
Elson isn’t alone in his criticism of GM’s performance review strategy.
‘Boneheaded’
Economist Alec Levenson, director and senior research scientist at the Center for Effective Organizations at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California in Los Angeles, said forced ranking was notoriously implemented by CEO Jack Welch at General Electric in the 1980s.
“GM is literally going back to the Jack Welch/GE playbook,” Levenson told Shifting Gears. “That’s very old school and incredibly retro, in a bad way. It’s boneheaded. You’re going to end up cutting some of your top performers for the wrong reasons.”
If cost-cutting is the goal, GM could put the names of high performing workers in a lottery and draw names for termination, which would alleviate age discrimination claims, he said.
“If you did this forced distribution of rankings one or maybe two times, you can arguably identify low performers,” Levenson said. “But then you’re going deeper and deeper into the pool of pretty good performers. It’s a mathematical certainty. Why is GM doing this? It sounds like a way to take out labor costs. It sounds 100% like a labor-cost-cutting exercise.”
Evidence has shown that companies doing this are targeting older people, he said. “GM could cut by department, using contributions to the business to guide where bigger versus smaller cuts should be made. Instead, this brute force reclassifying people from high performing to termination raises all kinds of questions. Then employees wonder about the whole performance rating process. ‘Was it just bullshit last year?’”
In an internal 2024 FAQ memo obtained by Shifting Gears, GM wrote that many top-performing public companies (including banks, Silicon Valley companies and more) use a similar review system. “Regardless of what other companies are doing, GM needs to be the highest-performing culture to succeed and win.”
‘Hunger Games’
After GM implemented the job review program two years ago, posts spiked on the Reddit online forum site designated for GM workers (r/GeneralMotors) and discussion included:
The review term is identified by managers as a “performance indicator.”
“Performance Calibration” = Hunger Games
“In a way, they are fostering a work culture that doesn’t reward collaboration on the same team because you are now competing with all your coworkers to get stacked higher.”
The GM Reddit site, created for issues discussion among employees and retirees, averages 20,000 visitors a week, according to its analytics statement.
Boss puked
A former GM engineer with knowledge of the forced ranking protocol told Shifting Gears that the new system “absolutely turns people against each other” and middle managers trying to protect their own team actually attempt to make others teams look bad.
“I can defend myself against issues with co-workers and my boss can see that, but when another middle manager goes to my boss and makes me look bad, who is he going to believe? That’s where it breaks down,” the engineer said.
“A team can have all superstars, the best of the best, but somebody has to get a low score,” said the engineer, who has worked at two companies that used forced ranking in performance reviews. “I once saw a manager select someone and they eventually walked her out. The manager went into the bathroom and puked. It’s a lot of stress.”
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As a former political reporter at The Des Moines Register, I’m a proud member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative — world-class journalists writing news, commentary and features.
Oh wow...I remember this same bullshit eval system at Mediacom. None of the sales staff graded that well based on the stupid parameters, it sucked for morale. I was never their top sales guy but LOTS of times I was doing a thing called CUSTOMER SERVICE...doing clean up work for my clients that nobody else was doing.
The good news is 200 of us got laid off--with a nice severance package--in fall 2020. That plus unemployment gave me a year to get my book written & published before I had to get another FT job.
GM=Gutwrenching Mayhem???
And if they wanna cut expenses, maybe look at CEO etc pay???
The claim that Ford isnt doing this anymore is demonstrably false. I know someone who has been routinely forced to change the rankings they gave people they managed because their bosses wanted to meet a certain distribution of inconsistent/met/exceed, not because of the employees actual performance. This was as recent as this year. It has caused them a lot of stress because they felt it was so unfair to good employees. It's being used as a tool to excuse who gets separated in the next round of layoffs, and its always excused as just "raising the bar every year." After the upper rankings force the adjusted ratings upper management claim there's "no fixed percentage" in public and in writing, while refusing to accept the rankings until one is met. All the while telling the managers they haven't been critical enough until they do. Then separated employees have to sign papers saying they won't sue the company if they want any kind of severance or health benefits.