I brought the department to a higher level.I had many thanks yous and congrats on a great job etc. I was hired as a contractor thru a job agency with instructions that if I made the grade thru a 6 month probationary period I would be hired permanently as a company employee.

2 weeks before the 6 month hire date I got a call from my supervisor who works in an office across the country in a corporate office in Oklahoma. This is a multi billion dollar energy company. This was a good news bad news call. Good news was I was the strongest performing contractor they had nationwide. They had hundreds of contractors and I was to be at the very top of the hire list. First one hired. Bad news was our department (design department of engineering) just initiated a hire freeze due to Obama's politics in natural gas pipelines and slowing the industry.

Well after seeing them hire young, fresh out of college engineers on the average of once or twice a month our 200 employee office eventually filled up with new company employees all around me. I was still stuck as a contractor almost 3 years later with no vacation days, no sick days, no holidays, no stock shareing, no raises, I was being paid an introductory rate which was to be corrected if I was hired also, never being invited to company quarterly meetings, company dinners etc.

I did not miss a single day of work for the entire time. When they closed the office for holidays I was the only person to come in over weekends to make up the holidays and I got to know the carpet cleaning company that came in during closed office days. Only 1 of almost 200 employees in that office would be there as their department required 24/7 monitoring of facilities out in the field and they always wouldmcomment too about being surprised I was not yet hired since that was obvious with me working on saturday and sunday.

I asked about every 6 months about being hired as I have family too and my family would enjoy actually taking a vacation every year like the rest of the employees do there. Also I was missing out on a substantial amount of wages which were promised upon beingnhired. Aboit $10/hour raise was typical when being hired accoriding to my coworkers. I was always told possibly in 3 or 4 months.

I was also the only one stop shop for them performing electrical and mechanical design work and documentation. My list of projects that engineers were waiting to assign to me was growing into 3 to 5 years worth of work which by the end of that would have generated years worth of updating and modifying, adding on equipment with company growth etc. It was long term and endless.

My hiring supervisor retired, the replacement supervisor also happy with my work told me I had the wrong attitude after being there 2 years, saying I am just there to help during busy times. That was absolutely not the premise of my interview and agreement with the supervisor that hired me. When I started, there were three of us handling my departments work for our area and they intended on expanding and hiring more.

5 months later one left because they did not hire him at his 6 months date but kept him on as a contractor. He was almost my age. He lived far away so felt it was not worth the long daily commute as a contractor with no benefits.

A year later sadly my partner who was a company employee passed away. I was still not hired even tho most of the employees and engineers in my office were astonished I was not yet hired especially after my handling all the engineering design needs in our office single handedly for over a year at this point.

After several false promises I finally gave up. Didn't want to go thru another summer without taking my son on a family vacation. He lost his mom a few years ago due to medical conditions and we both needed a vacation.

Every other office they have in the United states have at least 3 to 5 or 6 designers handling their geographic area. I handles a larger more active area single handedly.

For 8 years on my prior job I started there with 4 designers which within a few months ended up handling the entire 1000 employee manufacturing plant by myself as the others either relocated or retired. They originally planned on replacing them but soon realized I was able to handle everything by revamping the entire drafting department system making it more efficient and more computreized modernizing most of the daily tasks and revamping their entire drawing database to allow anyone in the plant to access drawings etc.eliminating the need for hundreds of drawing requests plant wide freeing up valuable time.

I feel it's age discrimination. Is there anything I can do?