Nooses and slurs vs. contested firing: Pa. discrimination cases yield very different outcomes

In mid-August, a Black oil and gas employee in western Pennsylvania secured a monetary award in a case alleging “severe” and “persistent” racial harassment in the workplace — conduct that he said his direct supervisor allowed and even participated in.

The very same week, a former Starbucks manager in the Philadelphia region also won money in a workplace discrimination case after accusing the coffee behemoth of firing her for being white. Altogether, the coffee shop manager is slated to get more than $28 million related to her claims of racial discrimination.

The Black oil and gas employee? $80,000.

“At first blush, the first reaction anyone would have is, how can there be such a disparity?” said Andrew Abramson, a Montgomery County lawyer who handles employment discrimination cases.

After all, federal regulators have described the western Pennsylvania case as a serious example of racial discrimination. They said the Black employee's co-workers repeatedly used a racial slur about him and others and had taunted him with nooses, a hate symbol that recalls the lynching of Black Americans at the hand of white mobs. With the company, Coastal Drilling East LLC, failing to intervene, the Black rig hand ended up resigning to escape the harassment, officials say.

By contrast, the federal agency that enforces anti-discrimination laws had rejected the white coffee shop manager's complaint for a lack of evidence that Starbucks was in violation. Despite that, she filed a lawsuit against her former employer under portions of the Civil Rights Act and the laws of New Jersey, which included stores that she'd previously supervised.

But experts say widely diverging outcomes in employment discrimination cases aren't unusual and can relate to a complex blend of factors: the specifics of the situation, the personalities of the people who are involved, the business at fault and, often most importantly, the identities of the jurors who are tasked with seeking justice.

The majority of employment discrimination cases get resolved long before trial, whether a judge tosses out the claim or the parties on both sides come to a settlement agreement, experts say. Settlements have an element of predictability, with the parties negotiating toward a resolution based on the facts of the case, Abramson said.

But for the ones that do culminate in a trial, there’s no telling what might happen, according to employment law experts.

Maybe an arrogant or snide witness ticks off jurors. Maybe the defendant in the case is a small, local company, and the panel worries that punishing it too harshly could put it out of business. Or perhaps the jury members don’t connect with the defendant or the employment conditions described in the case.

That’s one place where race, gender or other aspects of a defendant’s identity could influence the result.

“How those people in the jury box relate to that person, that person's experiences, definitely can be a big factor,” Abramson explained.

More: In fight against discrimination, Bucks County groups want a more united front

Whatever the case, an immense amount of power in these cases rests in the hands of an unpredictable jury, attorneys say.

And for many people who experience racial discrimination at work, the price of fighting in court is too steep to begin with, said Franklin E. Allen, president of the Greater Harrisburg NAACP.

"If you were to ask me ... No. 1, what would be the issue in legal representation in the Black community? I would tell you: the dollar," he said.

When the NAACP receives a report of workplace discrimination, the local branch reviews it and moves it to its legal redress committee, which gathers more information, Allen said. However, it's up to the NAACP's national Legal Defense Fund to handle class action cases, and only a small number of complaints make it that far, he said.

The local chapter does refer callers to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and other resources that might be helpful, according to Allen.

But when employees can't afford a private attorney, Allen said they often find themselves in a vulnerable position at their workplace, potentially at risk of retaliation for raising a discrimination complaint in the first place.

"It becomes a psychological warfare," he said.

Challenging cases to win

Comparing the Starbucks and Coastal Drilling cases, the gulf in monetary award totals was due primarily to the jury’s decision to give the former coffee manager $25 million in punitive damages, or payments used to punish companies deemed guilty of wrongdoing. The jury in the second case declined to award the Black drilling company employee any punitive damages, noted Ann Juliano, a law professor at Villanova University.

Winning punitive damages is no small challenge, says Charles Lamberton, a Pittsburgh-based employment law attorney. To do so, the jury has to conclude the employer in the case has acted with malice or reckless indifference to the rights of the worker who’s filed the complaint.

In other words, it’s not enough to prove you suffered workplace discrimination; you have to show “some sort of hate” or that your employer “knew what they were doing was illegal and they just didn’t care,” Lamberton said.

Despite the noose, racial slurs and alleged complicity by a supervisor, jurors in the Pittsburgh lawsuit were not satisfied that Coastal Drilling had acted with malice or reckless intent.

The salary of the employee bringing the claim is yet another factor, according to attorneys. Because the Starbucks manager was pulling a six-figure annual salary, the wage compensation soared into the millions. A federal judge in August awarded her $1 million in back-pay, $1.6 million in lost prospective future pay and $66,000 in tax damages.

For the Coastal Drilling employee, who had a smaller annual salary, the courts only granted about $56,000 in lost wages.

“Which, when you sort of layer that on top of occupational segregation and wage gap issues, could also explain perhaps some differences between the cases,” Juliano said.

And she said the notoriety of the Starbucks case — which became linked to larger, national conversations about systemic racism — might have come into play, along with jurors’ familiarity with the ubiquitous coffee shops.

“The jury really wanted to punish Starbucks, and Starbucks is such a big, huge corporation that if you fined them $100,000, the jury might have thought, ‘This isn't going to make a dent,’” she said.

But as much as the jury’s decision matters, the damages they award aren’t necessarily final, attorneys say. Judges can and often do adjust these amounts in response to appeals or to meet requirements of the law, Lamberton said.

Starbucks is fighting the court decisions in its case so far, arguing for a new trial and that the damages awarded by the jury were excessive.

‘A stark warning’

Starbucks fired the white regional manager in the midst of national outrage over the arrests of two Black men at a Philadelphia coffee shop in April 2018.

The men had planned to hold a meeting at the cafe, and while waiting for a business associate to arrive, they had asked to use the restroom. The store employees refused access to the bathroom because the man hadn’t purchased anything, according to officials, and subsequently asked them to leave the cafe because they weren’t customers.

Cafe workers called the police when the men wouldn’t leave, and an outcry erupted after a video of the incident went viral on social media.

The Starbucks regional director in Philadelphia, Shannon Phillips, has claimed she lost her job after complaining about a company directive to suspend a white district manager; the district manager in question did not supervise the store where the controversy erupted, and she argues Starbucks was trying to use him as a scapegoat amid the public uproar.

Starbucks, on the other hand, says supervisors fired Phillips for failing to meet the demands of a moment that required strong and strategic leadership. Their lawyers claimed she was late to or absent from company meetings in the aftermath of the 2018 arrests and receded to the background during conversations that she should’ve been facilitating.

After she lost her job, Phillips filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but the agency closed the case after finding it couldn’t conclude that Starbucks had violated federal laws.

In the Coastal Drilling case, federal regulators were so appalled by the allegations that they took the company to court themselves, saying former employee Andre Pryce had been subjected to a hostile work environment that forced him to exit his job. The EEOC won a jury trial in December and secured additional damages from a judge in August.

“Nooses and racial slurs have no place in the workplace and construction sites are no exception," EEOC Chair Charlotte Burrows said in a recent news release about the Coastal Drilling case.

“The jury’s verdict and resulting judgment against the defendants in this case should serve as a stark warning to all employers that the EEOC and the American people will not tolerate racial harassment and other forms of race discrimination in the workplace, and that juries and courts award sizable damages to victims in these cases,” said Debra Lawrence, an EEOC regional attorney for Philadelphia.

But limits on federal damages can make it difficult to send a meaningful message to employers, Lamberton said.

Federal law places a $300,000 cap on compensatory and punitive damages in employment discrimination cases filed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act when a large business is involved. For small and mid-sized companies, the ceiling is even lower.

(In the Starbucks case, the plaintiff argued the federal cap didn’t apply because she was pressing her claim under a different part of the Civil Rights Act and under New Jersey law.)

Lamberton said Congress hasn’t increased this cap since the 1990s and argues it’s insufficient to meet the needs of today.

“For companies that … do hundreds of billions of dollars in business and have a market capitalization over a trillion dollars, it’s going to take a lot of cash to sting,” he said. “They spend $300,000 on paper clips for one office.”

Political polarization is also a barrier to fairness in the legal system, Lamberton said. The bent of the federal judges who oversee cases and of the jury pool can determine an outcome, with large lawsuit awards more likely in liberal-leaning areas, he said.

And until there’s a fix for the partisanship that has seeped into the federal judicial appointment process, Lamberton argues that systemic equity and predictability in these cases will likely remain out of reach.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Why did these two Pa. work discrimination cases end so differently?