High Court Affirms
Award
in Discrimination
Case
By DAVID STOUT,
NYTimes on the Web, June 22, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Nine years ago,
Sheila White says, she was made to feel very unwelcome as the only woman working
in the maintenance department of a railroad yard in Memphis. And today,
the Supreme Court said a jury was right to award her $43,000 for complaining
about her treatment.
In a 9-to-0 ruling, the justices sided with Ms. White and against the Burlington
Northern and Santa Fe Railway, and in so doing broadened the protections for
workers who sue their employers for retaliation after lodging complaints.
Writing for the court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that "we believe it is
important to separate significant from trivial harms." An employee's
decision to report discrimination "cannot immunize that employee from those
petty slights or minor annoyances that often take place at work and that all
employees experience," he emphasized.
But the court found that what Ms. White went through went beyond the trivial and
the annoying.
Nine years ago this month, she was hired as a "track laborer," a down-and-dirty
job that involves removing and replacing track, cutting brush, clearing litter
and other drudgery. Soon there was an opening for a forklift operator, and
since she had operated forklifts before she was a logical choice.
But some of the men complained that a forklift was no place for a woman and made
insulting remarks to that effect. The offenders included her supervisor,
who was suspended by the railroad for 10 days and ordered to undergo training to
correct his sexually harassing ways.
But Ms. White's troubles were not over. Soon afterward, she was removed
from the forklift job and given standard laboring tasks. The man who had
hired her explained that other workers thought a "more senior man" should be
able to run the forklift, according to court papers.
So Ms. White filed two complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, one alleging that her reassignment amounted to unlawful gender-based
discrimination in retaliation for her complaining about sexual harassment, the
other alleging that she had been placed under surveillance by the man who had
hired her.
By this point, it was December. Ms. White had a run-in with another
supervisor and was suspended without pay for insubordination. She filed an
internal grievance, after which Burlington agreed that she had not been
insubordinate after all. So she was put back on the payroll and awarded
back pay for the 37 days she had been suspended. (Ms. White had filed
still another complaint with the E.E.O.C. over the suspension.)
But by then Christmas had come and gone. "That was the worst Christmas I
had out of my life," she testified. "No income, no money, and that made
all of us feel bad." Ms. White was so depressed that she sought medical
treatment.
The questions for the Supreme Court involved how much protection Ms. White, and
by extension other workers in similar straits, should enjoy under the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 against retaliation for complaining about discrimination, and
indeed just what "retaliation" might mean in this context.
The railroad argued, unsuccessfully, that both the forklift job and the laboring
tasks fell within Ms. White's job description, and that she had suffered "no
direct economic effect," especially since she had received back pay for the 37
days.
But the high court rejected that reasoning, and in so doing upheld the United
States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. "Many reasonable employees
would find a month without pay a serious hardship," the court said. "An
indefinite suspension without pay could well act as a deterrent to the filing of
a discrimination complaint, even if the suspended employee receives back pay."
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a separate opinion, concurring in the overall
judgment but differing with some of his colleagues' reasoning.
In emphasizing that employees can never be protected from all workplace slights,
the court said that "the significance of any given act of retaliation will often
depend upon the particular circumstances. Context matters."
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