August 12, 2007
Discrimination Lawsuit - After 13 Years, City Loses.
I don’t know how many Bostonians caught the article in this Saturday’s Boston Globe about the lawsuit brought against the city of Boston (Trustees of Health and Hospitals of the City of Boston) by five African-American women for the city’s horrible and discrimatory job layoff procedures. If you haven’t read the article, you might want to. I haven’t been able to find much info about the case online and as far as I can tell no one is blogging about it. What shocked me, aside from the fact that the case dragged on for 13 years (the layoffs occurred in 1994), was the degrading way in which Gloria Coney, Belinda Chambers, Victoria Higginbottom, Marlene Hinds, and Betty Smith were treated by Boston’s Healthy Baby/Healthy Child program in Hyde Park. And, as if it wasn’t bad enough that the women were treated like criminals the moment they lost their jobs, they were treated like criminals because of their race and their gender. (Also laid off was Christopher Navin, a white male.) The below is from Findlaw:
Marjorie Perkins, the program director of the Healthy Baby/Healthy Child Program, was in charge of the layoffs. She learned on or before June 30, 1994, that there would have to be layoffs in the program. After Perkins chose the employees who were going to be laid off, she requested assistance from THH’s management in carrying out the layoffs. The director of labor relations, Teri McNamara, was sent to assist her. On numerous occasions, Perkins and McNamara discussed the manner in which the layoffs were to be conducted.
Coney and Hinds were laid off on July 19, 1994, when Perkins and McNamara called them into Perkins’s office and informed them that they were being laid off effective immediately, and that they should collect their belongings and leave within thirty minutes. In full view of their coworkers and Hinds’s daughters (who happened to be at the office), McNamara and two other employees monitored Coney and Hinds as they packed their things. The monitoring was such that Hinds’s daughters thought their mother was being observed to prevent stealing. Perkins and one of the employees examined Coney’s belongings as she packed, including an inspection of her lunch bag. She was told that the monitoring was to ensure she did not take anything issued by THH. Coney refrained from using the restroom because she felt she would be watched. She asked for special permission to return the following day to collect the rest of her things. She was allowed to do so, again under the supervision of an employee. Coney did not have an opportunity to say goodbye to her coworkers, some of whom cried and asked if she was being arrested.
Higginbottom, Chambers, and Smith were not at work on July 19. On July 20, they were summoned to Perkins’s office, informed that they were being laid off effective immediately, and sent to pack their belongings. They were monitored in a fashion similar to the scrutiny Hinds and Coney had endured. Notably, Smith did not have an opportunity to collect all her belongings and left photographs and certificates in the office. In addition, McNamara pulled papers out of Chambers’s hands as Chambers packed and “order[ed] Chambers around.” Chambers’s officemate cried as Chambers packed. McNamara also refused to allow Chambers to contact her clients to tell them she would not make her appointments that day. Finally, after several requests, McNamara permitted Chambers to take the telephone numbers of some of her clients home to contact them later.
These layoff procedures stand in stark contrast to the treatment Navin received upon his termination. Navin was given a month’s advance notice of his layoff. He was allowed to come to the office at his convenience to receive his termination notice. After being told that a particular employee whom he knew from another job was to give him his notice, he requested that it be a different employee, and his request was granted. Navin was not monitored as he cleaned out his desk and he was permitted to walk around the building freely to say goodbye to his coworkers. A week later, he returned to the office, but was asked to leave because there had been allegations of discrimination concerning the layoffs.
Thankfully, the SJC concluded on Friday that the “trustees had ‘a discriminatory hierarchy in who would be spared from the layoff procedure, with white males at the top, women below them, and African-American women at the bottom’” and the women FINALLY won their case. All I can say is that THH should be ashamed of their ridiculous unwillingness to just admit that they were wrong and pay the piper. Congratulations ladies. You deserve it.
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Garden variety North American Nomad. Born in the Midwest; lived and worked on the West Coast and abroad; studied in the South. Recently spotted putting down roots in New England.