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Race and Sex Bias Suit Is Filed Against a New Jersey UtilityBy MATTHEW C. McCUE and RONALD SMOTHERS, NYTimes purchase from Web April 23, 2004NEWARK, April 13 -- Citing inappropriate and offensive behavior at the state's largest electric utility, Public Service Electric and Gas Company, 11 current and former employees filed a racial and sex discrimination lawsuit Tuesday in state court. The plaintiffs, who include plant floor workers, secretaries and executives whose employment with the company ranges from 2 to 36 years, maintain that only white male employees are able to advance into high-level supervisory roles. ''We demand a change in PSE&G culture, starting from the top down,'' said John R. Smith, 57, the regional public affairs manager for the utility. Mr. Smith, who is black, is one of two prominent plaintiffs in the lawsuit. ''This company has long refused to pay minority employees a salary equal to their white counterparts.'' In a written statement, PSE&G said, ''We deny the assertions of discrimination.'' Paul Rosengren, a spokesman for the company, said in the statement that PSE&G has settled some of the grievances that had come out of several company reorganizations and had referred others to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that investigates discrimination reports. Mr. Rosengren said in the statement that the lawsuit, filed in State Superior Court in Newark, ''disrupts the ongoing process.'' Joining the 11 employees and their lawyers at a news conference in a Newark hotel were the president of the New Jersey chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., the executive director of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition's Wall Street Project, and a group of local elected officials. The two civil rights groups are not directly involved in the lawsuit but said they saw in it an opportunity to support people who had come to them seeking help and at the same time advance broader social goals. Keith Jones, president of the New Jersey chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., said he thought the case was ''a train that was going to run on two tracks'' -- one track being litigation, the other social justice. R. Fenimore Fisher, executive director of the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, founded in 1997 to pressure American companies to improve minority employees' involvement in their operations, said some of the plaintiffs had come to him in May 2003 for assistance. He said company executives had agreed to meet with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, but refused to meet with the employees. Mr. Fisher said he was ''strongly encouraging PSE&G to try and solve the matter without going through formal litigation.'' Cyrus Mehri, a Washington-based lawyer who has represented minority employees filing federal discrimination suits against large corporations like Texaco and Coca-Cola, said that by going to state court, the New Jersey plaintiffs were taking advantage of a New Jersey antidiscrimination statute that was ''quite strong.'' ''The New Jersey statute allows the plaintiffs to get damages for both disparate treatment and disparate impact,'' he said. ''You can get to those issues in federal court, but only after the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers it. This way you proceed to the merits more quickly.'' In court papers, Rhonda Price, a plaintiff and an apprentice substation mechanic since 2002, described being forced to listen to ''discussions of lewd sexual acts'' while working with white male co-workers. Supervisors ignored her complaints about the incidents, the court papers said, and at one point a co-worker used an offensive term about black women to refer to her. She was reprimanded when she took her complaints to the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, according to the lawsuit. Another plaintiff, Ulysses Rice Jr., 57, a black man who rose from cadet engineer in 1968 to become a plant manager at the utility's Bergen generating station in 1985, charged that after that, he has been moved laterally to at least four different positions while being denied financial and career advancement. ''For 18 years I've been stuck in a revolving door,'' Mr. Rice said in a telephone interview. ''I said, 'Time out, that's enough, there has to be a change.''' The company employs 10,500 people and serves 2 million electric and 1.6 million natural gas customers over a 2,600-square-mile area. Its stock is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and last year the 100-year-old company had revenues of $11.1 billion, ranking it 176th on the Fortune 500. Jeff Brown, another lawyer from the firm representing the plaintiffs, Leeds, Morelli & Brown of Long Island, said he hoped the lawsuit would encourage the company to advance and promote minority employees into decision-making positions. |
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