Dive Brief:
- A registered nurse may move forward with her hostile work environment claims against a Texas health system, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Tuesday, despite the court affirming a grant of summary judgment to her employer on her race, national origin and disability discrimination claims.
- The plaintiff in Brenyah v. Columbia Hospital Corp. of Bay Area, a U.S. citizen born in Ghana, alleged that she and other Black nurses experienced harassment “sometimes almost every shift.” She claimed that multiple reports to supervisors did not stop the offending behavior and further alleged that her employer retaliated against her by placing her on an extended probationary period.
- Though it upheld summary judgment for the employer on the plaintiff’s bias claims, the 5th Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment on her hostile work environment claims. It found that she had met her proof burden to show that the alleged harassment, which included secondhand harassment toward another Black employee that the plaintiff witnessed, affected a term, condition or privilege of her employment.
Dive Insight:
In support of her hostile work environment claims, the plaintiff relied upon a variety of evidence, including her deposition testimony and that of one of her Black co-workers as well as emails that documented harassing incidents.
These experiences caused the plaintiff to “question how she could function in such an environment and made her feel ‘less than human,’” she alleged. She also produced counseling records that showed she was distressed, traumatized and afraid of harm as a result of the conduct and claimed her work performance consequentially suffered.
Moreover, the secondhand harassment that the plaintiff allegedly saw her co-worker experience “weighs in [her] favor when assessing the totality of the circumstances,” the 5th Circuit said, citing its prior precedent.
Under federal workplace civil rights laws like Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employers can be held liable for harassment if they knew or should have known about the harassment and failed to take prompt corrective action.
The employer in this case, doing business as Corpus Christi Medical Center and Bay Area Healthcare Group, argued that it took such action by conducting interviews and coaching nurses who allegedly made the offending conduct. CCMC also offered to transfer the plaintiff.
But the 5th Circuit took issue with this line of argument. It noted that CCMC staff testimony about the investigation and interview records contained discrepancies, while the employer also failed to produce an investigation file or notes in discovery. The plaintiff provided evidence that the managers who conducted the investigation had told her that “the cliques were not going anywhere,” and she alleged that the harassment continued after the investigation.
Ultimately, the plaintiff “has pointed to evidence that CCMC’s investigation was insufficiently prompt and thorough,” the court said.
The use of repeated epithets or slurs has previously been cited by courts as potential evidence in favor of plaintiffs’ hostile work environment claims. This was the case in a decision of the 9th Circuit in 2019, which held that a manager’s use of four racial slurs over a one-year period could be sufficient to show that the plaintiff faced an abusive work environment.
Similarly, the 10th Circuit issued a decision last week reviving a hostile work environment case against Walmart, in which the court held that a plaintiff who faced multiple discriminatory acts plausibly alleged the existence of such an environment.