THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Not just the customers, though its been over 40 years since an attorney warned me about the failings of their claim service, failings that, if the complaints are to be believed, continue to this day. The insurance giant treats its employees the same way. Or I should say "former employees" since Allstate now pretends they are independent contractors.

But after building up their agencies for nearly a decade or more, the agents said they were called into meetings in late 1999 by Allstate managers. The agents could keep on selling Allstate policies, they were told, but they would no longer be entitled to health insurance, a retirement account or profit-sharing, and their pension benefits would no longer accrue. Instead, they would become independent contractors.

The company said the changes were the result of a “group reorganization.”

The men are among 6,200 agents who faced the same predicament: To continue to work with Allstate, the insurer required them to sign a release waiving their rights to sue. Most of them did sign, but a group of 31 agents sued Allstate anyway, for, among other claims, age discrimination and breach of contract.

Thirteen years later, the case is still winding through the courts. A judge ruled in February that a jury should decide whether the waiver the agents signed was valid, and it appeared, briefly, a trial date would be set for this spring. But last-minute complications have delayed the process again. More documents in the case — the plaintiffs are seeking class-action status — are expected to be filed in mid-May.

While the Allstate case is an extreme example, it illustrates the challenges employees face when they decide to sue an employer. Employee discrimination claims — which account for the majority of job-related lawsuits — are on the rise, but they remain notoriously hard to prove, legal experts said. (There were 21,396 age discrimination charges in 2013 filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or nearly 23 percent of all charges filed, up from 16,548 in 2006.)

“These cases are hard to win,” said Stewart J. Schwab, dean and professor at Cornell Law School, who studied the success rates of employment discrimination cases from 1979 to 2006. He and his co-author found that of the small fraction of cases that go to trial, plaintiffs win about 28 percent of the time, on average, compared with nearly 45 percent in other types of civil cases.

The Allstate case demonstrates the risks inherent in signing documents — as the agents did — agreeing not to sue. The latest ruling in the case hangs on that very point.

Before the agents can bring the discrimination and other claims, a jury must decide that the employees were coerced into signing the waivers. Allstate, on the other hand, contends they signed knowingly — a point the company must prove to prevail.

In a statement, Allstate said it continually improved the way it did business to help customers and agents, and the plaintiffs were offered “significant benefits to participate in such a change, including the ability to sell their agencies, which they could not have done as employees.”

But the agents, 90 percent of whom were over age 40, said the consequences of not signing the release were costly: They would be prohibited from working as insurance agents within one mile of their agencies for one to two years, even though the agents leased or bought their offices in their own name. They would not be allowed to keep their business phone numbers. And the agents said Allstate warned them that they could never solicit their old customers, which they later learned was not true.

“Whatever options they offered left me worse off than I was before,” Mr. Crease said.

Ultimately, he said, he had no choice but to sign, sentiments echoed by both Mr. Littlejohn and Mr. Harper. They all continued as independent contractors, at least for several more years.

“They were put between a rock and a hard place,” said Tom Osborne, a senior lawyer with AARP’s litigation arm, who is co-counsel representing the plaintiffs. “If they didn’t sign, they couldn’t make a living as an independent agent.”

Those good hands are good at taking, not so much at giving. But then there is no profit in giving.