Bias suits scale corporate ladder (record number of discrimination claims in workplace)

MSNBC ^ | Nov. 30, 2002 | Neely Tucker

[Michael2001]

The day Ellen Early walked into her first Diversity Roundtable meeting, she was a confident and ambitious junior executive at Marriott Management Services. And why not? Her company, the Gaithersburg-based food and management service conglomerate, was pairing mid-level minority employees with senior white executives who would show them how to ascend the corporate ladder.

SEVEN YEARS later, when Early walked into the office of a Washington law firm, she was an embittered former Marriott employee whose dreams of success had evaporated. The Diversity Roundtable, she had concluded, was a sham, designed to appease blacks without delivering the positions they sought, the ones with bigger paychecks, stock options and company cars.

What Early and a dozen other black managers at the 100,000-employee company, now known as Sodexho USA, started that day in 1999 has become one of the nation’s largest class-action race discrimination suits as well as an uneasy story of its era.

The plaintiffs allege that Sodexho has a “pattern and practice” of denying blacks promotions and deserved advancements — an accusation vehemently denied by the company. Similar allegations are now being leveled in unprecedented numbers, against small businesses, sprawling corporations and even professional sports teams.

The case, certified as a class-action suit by U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle to include more than 2,600 black current and former Sodexho employees, is part of a shift in race discrimination law that illustrates the frustrations of the rising black middle class. Well-educated, aware of their rights and with access to legal redress, these workers are now filing record numbers of federal discrimination suits, most of them about advancement.

Black employees filed more than 21,000 discrimination lawsuits in federal courts last year and nearly 5,000 promotion complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, both records, and companies now pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to settle such claims, creating a burgeoning field of law.

[Michael2001]

I am not naive enough to think that discrimination no longer exists. At the same time it is my opinion that the majority of these claims are baseless. You don't get the promotion you want, just charge discrimination, and in today's environment you're bound to win.

I own a security firm with a few of my friends and I know for a fact that we have lost out on certain corporate jobs because we are white. I know this because the people we dealt with told us that we were their first choice but upper management told them to look for an African American firm. Of course we were angry but we didn't sue.

The fact that we are all white is not discrimination on our part. With the excpetion of one, all of our employees are Baptist too. It just so happens that the people we employ are our friends and family, and where I grew up everyone was white and Baptist.

Despite this, I know that if we were ever sued with a discrimination suit, we'd probably lose.

[A CA Guy]

Tort Reofrm......Tort Reform......Tort Reform

[Hillarys Gate Cult]

Companies are doing their own form of tort reform. It seems that employees in China don't sue.

[ikka]

Reading the article, I can see a few things:

1. One plaintiff did get a better job and a pay raise, after jumping ship to another company. Thus, the original company was punished in the market, in that they lost a valuable employee.

2. Another plaintiff in the case spoke with senior mgmt about the "need" for more diversity - rather than focusing on what benefited the company. In some respects, he deserved to not be promoted, since the purpose of a company is not to be diverse, but to make money for the shareholders.

[LenS]

You don't even have to move to China. Just move to areas where the black population is low (bye bye big city, hello Vermont). Or contract out those tasks where there are a lot of black employees (cafeteria, janitorial, trucking, etal). Thanks to the teacher's unions, a lot of blacks get screwed in the public schools so a company can simply make sure that they only offer jobs that require certain achieved levels of education (illiteracy or even semi-literacy is a career killer). Or you can simply offer lower starting salaries -- let other companies or governments win the battle for the smaller pool of well-educated blacks by offering less to start. There's a whole host of strategies that can be used to minimize legal exposure.

Sad, but when you let lawyers run wild, everybody loses, especially when you let the concept of entitlement erode everything.

[ctn]

With greedy trial lawyers prodding them on, what's to prevent every African-American who's denied a raise or promotion from suing?

[judgeandjury]

You don't get the promotion you want, just charge discrimination, and in today's environment you're bound to win.

Exactly. But what this article makes me wonder is how many white employees nationwide feel that they didn't receive the promotions that they deserved. The black employees can sue for discrimination if they feel that they have been snubbed for promotions, but what can the white employees do if they feel that they have been snubbed? It looks like the scales are tilted in favor of the black employees.

[Treeless Branch]

I am an employment law attorney. I represet strictly companies and management. I have yet to see a legitimate discrimination claim. Unfortunately, to defend these claims it costs around $100,000, that is for an individual plaintiff case. This does not include the potential jury award. Juries are so dumbed-down these days, and corporations are so vilified for being the cause of every wrong that companies cannot risk taking cases to trial. Therefore, they often settle baseless claims.

My resolution for this problem: get rid of the employment discrimnation laws, at least for private companies. In my estimation, if you take the risk to start a business, you should be able to hire and fire who you want for any reason or no reason.

[Drew68]

The day Ellen Early walked into her first Diversity Roundtable meeting

This is exactly why I walked away from my last job of four years in middle management and now paint and restore cars for a living.

[Henchman]

I agree. Yes there is discrimination. But it is also against Whites, particularly males. If you like it, keep voting Democratic. No where in these suits by minorities do they ever mention ability, education, experience etc - in essence all employment grinds down to "equality" as liberally defined (RACE) - not merit. In addition, the government EEO includes other minorities, who have no education and can hardly speak English. Speaking of English, I have noted a number of "English Accents" on TV lately, does England hire Americans for their TV?

BTW the government has institutionalized discrimination against Whites as Politically Correct.

[Holden Magroin]

You can think George Bush Sr. for this, since he was the one signed that idiotic Civil Rights Act of 1990.