Thread: NC: Supermarket Settles Discrimination Claim

Every little victory counts!


Supermarket settles discrimination claim Thursday, Jan. 31, 2008 8:16 am


CHARLOTTE (AP) — A supermarket has agreed to pay a total of $40,000 to three former employees who accused the store of discriminating against non-Hispanic workers.

The former employees filed the complaint last year, saying they were forced out of their Compare Foods jobs in 2004 because they were not Hispanic. Two of the employees were black and one was white.

Compare Foods lawyer Phil Van Hoy said the company treated the workers fairly, arguing that a company with lots of Hispanic customers is allowed to have employees that can communicate with them.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Lynette Barnes said Compare couldn't prove that it was necessary job qualification to speak Spanish or relate to Hispanics. The company agreed to the settlement in federal court this week.

The grocery store chain was founded in Freeport, New York, and now has 50 supermarkets in seven states.




http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... /-1/news06

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney Lynette Barnes said Compare couldn't prove that it was necessary job qualification to speak Spanish or relate to Hispanics. The company agreed to the settlement in federal court this week.

Good news! That should apply to any job then? I am amazed that EEOC took such a conservative viewpoint.

Well, I guess the Charlotte office of the EEOC deserves some kudos for finding their way to the 'just' result, but this?:

...a total of $40,000 to three former employees..

Compared to many other suits based on gender, race, etc. other bases of discrimination, that seems like a mere 'road bump' into the finances of a 50+ store chain (eg. probably won't serve as a functional deterrent to future discrimination at all...)

Yeah, a lot of EEOC awards are in the 100-200k range.

Well it's a start!! We have heard of other people being let go because they are not bilingual. Many ads around here say that being bilingual is a requirement. So you can even get in for an interview.

When will this madness stop???

Even though I scored 95% on a county of Los Angeles test (A hard one!!!!) about 10 years ago....I could NOT be hired because I wasn't Bilingual Spanish

La Raza...Did you see this?

I stopped going to McDonalds because of anti-nonHispanic discrimination. Yea, they sent me a bunch of coupons (still have them), but they will NEVER get my business. I undestand espanol at a moderate level. Unfortunately the manage stereotyped me and talked 'behind' my back while serving others much faster and before me. Let me put it this way..I am third in line and the 6th person served one day and a few days later it was a similar situation.

Did La Raza see the survey where racial groups trust whiteys like myself more than any other racial group besides there own?

Hey...the girl I am dating is hispanic and she can put up with my opinions better than LaRaza. Oh, wait, she is more anti-illegal than I am. Dang.

Discrimination suit settled
Compare Foods agrees to pay $40,000 to former employees replaced by Latinos
DEBORAH HIRSCH
dhirsch@charlotteobserver.com

Eugene Gates Jr. is a self-proclaimed "meat man."

The 57-year-old Charlotte native started slicing meat when he was a high school student in 1965. He had almost 40 years of experience by the time new owners of the grocery store where he'd been working on North Tryon Street converted it to Compare Foods in January 2004.

So he said he was outraged when his hours were cut in half and a young Latino employee was brought in to take his shifts. Gates said he was told that the company needed someone who could better relate to the store's Latino customers.

"This fellow was like maybe 22, 23, 25 at the most," Gates said. "I'm 50-something. He couldn't know as much as I know. You just don't treat people like that."

This week, he and two other former employees were awarded a total of $40,000 to settle a national origin and race discrimination lawsuit filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in U.S. District Court.

Compare Foods also agreed to create a formal anti-discrimination policy that would be distributed and included in employee training. The company will post a notice about the lawsuit at its North Tryon location and send biannual reports to the EEOC on every employee that leaves the store, and why, for the next three years.

Phil Van Hoy, lawyer for Compare Foods, said the company maintains that the workers were treated fairly.

The way the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been interpreted, he said, a business can require employees to have certain qualifications if proven necessary. So, if you have a big enough Latino customer base, it's lawful "to have at least enough of your employees who can communicate with them," he said.

Compare Foods was founded in Freeport, N.Y., in 1989 by the Peña family, according to the company Web site. There are now more than 50 Compare Foods stores in seven states, including 20 in North Carolina.

The North Tryon location had been various grocery stores before Compare Foods bought it. The new owner told employees there wouldn't be any changes, Gates said, but within a month, the management began bringing in Latino workers. Many were young and inexperienced, he said, especially for meat cutting.

"You just don't bring somebody off the street. That's a skill you have to be trained for," Gates said, holding up his thumb, which is missing a piece from an accident with a meat saw.

Gates said he was making $12.50 an hour as the meat department's assistant manager and was working five to eight hours of overtime a week when he was told that his hours would be cut in half.

He said he felt forced to resign.

A month later, meat wrapper Bernice Grier, of Charlotte, was fired, followed by department manager Thomas McCoy, of Rock Hill, said EEOC regional attorney Lynette Barnes. Both were replaced with Latino workers.

Grier, who is black, did not respond to phone calls. McCoy, who is white, declined to comment, but confirmed facts.

Barnes said that Compare Foods couldn't prove that it was a necessary job qualification to be able to relate to Latinos or speak Spanish. Gates said most of the customers there used to be black. It wasn't until 2004, he said, that he began to see an even mix of black and Latino customers.

Sometimes, Gates said, there were communication problems with Spanish-speaking customers, but he could figure out what they wanted by showing them things in the deli case. He learned that many of them preferred thin cuts of meat.

"I can cut it just as thin as you want it. I could cut anything you want," he said.

There's no doubt that the North Tryon store caters to a Latino market now. Salsa music greets customers at the store entrance, and the shelves inside are packed with products from Mexico and other Latin-American countries, many of them labeled en español.

Barnes said this is one of only a few cases she's seen in which a company said it needed more Latino workers to serve a Latino market. But, she said, the EEOC has seen more and more cases nationwide concerning discrimination against non-Latinos where companies were seeking Latino workers as a cheap source of labor.

This is the only discrimination lawsuit Compare Foods has faced in its Charlotte stores, Van Hoy said.

"It's an unusual case at this point in time, but I don't think it will be in the future," Van Hoy said. "It's a sign of the times."

http://www.charlotte.com/112/story/470883.html

I know it's rampent here. There are places you go where there are nothing but latino employees. I said this from the beginning and I still stand behind it 100%......it's simply 100% racism just using language as the barrier to hide behind. Learn English here and every race is equal. Adding "must speak Spanish" to the mix keeps more people out of jobs and opens it to just hispanics when it's "discriminatory" to say "must speak English". Even non-hispanics who took Spanish are still targeted because they claim they still can't understand them.....only hispanics can speak it well enough to satisfy them. They hire hispanics who speak English and hispanics for "must speak Spanish" and the rest are left out in the cold.