Greedy Trial Lawyer
Turn To Page Five For The Definition Of A Hostile Workplace
Category: The Latest Baddest
Occasionally one lawsuit can serve as a primer on a particuiar subject. Today, I have a nominee for the subject of a hostile workplace. This workplace may set a marker that will last for years.
Employees Sue Vision Care Charity for Discrimination
One of Santa Barbara's most important and distinctive charities, Surgical Eye Expeditions International (SEE), has been hit with a lawsuit by four employees - one of whom has since been fired - who are accusing the organization of racial discrimination and harassment.Although the supervisor they accused of using racial slurs left the job in November, the plaintiffs claim that their complaints garnered continuing defamation, harassment, and other retaliation from members of the organization's board of directors.
The lawsuit, filed in mid January, describes a hostile workplace in which people had to listen to a white supervisor use crude racial epithets, including "nigger" and "stupid Mexicans" to describe clients and coworkers. Three of the plaintiffs are Hispanic; one is black. When the plaintiffs complained to the human resources director, who is Asian, the supervisor against whom the complaints were filed then allegedly said of the human resources director, "I hate that little chink, or Jap, or whatever he is." The same supervisor allegedly called another employee "white trash," made jokes about Jews, and referred to a Chumash leader as "Chief Powwow."
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Comments
Actually, I submit that this is a poor example of a "hostile workplace" w.r.t. Title VII inasmuch as the racial slurs seemed to be applied on an equal opportunity basis, as it were: if "white trash", "niggers", "stupid Mexicans", "chinks", "Japs", and Native Americans were all subjected to abuse on the subject of race, I fail to see the discriminatory effect of the supervisor's behavior.
This is, I think, a real problem with Title VII. It has been shoehorned into a role for which it was not written: a law of workplace civility. Its misapplication sometimes creates jarring effects, such as cases of bisexual harassment that can find no remedy at law.
I think that we probably need a law of workplace harassment that draws on privacy law rather than racial or sex-based discrimination. (Jeffrey Rosen lays out such a case in The Unwanted Gaze.) Our Title VII jurisprudence has been stretched and reshaped into incoherence.
Posted by: Matt Norwood ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.greedytriallawyer.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at February 20, 2007 11:48 AM