Dive Brief:
- Coal Bed Services and its parent company, Pate Holdings, should face trial over two Black laborers’ discrimination claims, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Sept. 1. The evidence raised jury questions over whether the Alabama companies subjected workers to “strikingly different treatment” based on their race, according to the ruling in Guthrie v. Coal Bed Services, Inc.
- The laborers testified that supervisors refused to call them by their names, assigned them “dirtier” work than White employees and failed to give them the same opportunities to develop skills, according to the court opinion. Shortly after they complained to their direct supervisor, he ordered their team to take a drug test or be fired. The laborers and a White co-worker refused and walked off the site. Coal Bed rehired the co-worker the next day but allegedly stonewalled the laborers in their attempts to get their jobs back, according to court documents.
- The case highlights how plaintiffs offering circumstantial evidence of employment discrimination don’t always have to identify a valid comparator outside their protected class to proceed with their claims, as typically required by the McDonnell Douglas test. Here, even if the White co-worker wasn’t similarly situated in a material way because he had more experience and different duties, the laborers could still take their case to trial based on a “convincing mosaic” of evidence suggesting the companies intentionally engaged in race discrimination, the 11th Circuit said.
Dive Insight:
The Guthrie plaintiffs claimed their firings were pretext for unlawful discrimination and retaliation. They sued Coal Bed for allegedly violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They also alleged Coal Bed and Pate Holdings violated 42 U.S.C.§ 1981. The 11th Circuit reversed a lower court’s summary judgment for the companies and sent the case back for trial.
Coal Bed did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
The ruling reminds employers that under a “convincing mosaic” approach, plaintiffs who lack the McDonnell Douglas type of comparator evidence can still defeat a motion for summary judgment with other “significant evidence of illegal discrimination,” the 11th Circuit said.
In Guthrie, the evidence showed that besides the alleged way other supervisors treated the Black laborers, Coal Bed not only rehired the White worker, but it paid him for a full shift the day he walked off the job, even though he only worked four hours. By comparison, the laborers who walked off the job at the same time for the same reason were paid for just four hours. They also were allegedly replaced by two White workers, one of whom had previously failed a drug test, the court pointed out.
Additionally, the direct supervisor testified he ordered the drug test because an employee reported seeing the two laborers smoking marijuana on the job. However, they denied doing so, and Coal Bed had no written documents to corroborate the supervisor’s testimony — which was inconsistent with prior representations Coal Bed made in an equal employment statement that didn’t mention any report and asserted instead that the drug test was random, the 11th Circuit noted.