Ingham County jury awards $1.3 million to Stockbridge man
By: Tim Martin, Lansing State Journal
Joe Pena says he put up with racial slurs almost every workday for a decade before he sued his employer, the Ingham County Road Commission. He hoped his lawsuit would end the abuse.
Last month, he was awarded a $1.3 million jury verdict - one of several nationwide indicating workplace harassment continues despite heightened publicity for political correctness, codes of conduct and programs designed to thwart it.
"If they had tried to do something to stop it, or even said they were sorry, I wouldn't have filed the lawsuit," said Pena, 42, of Stockbridge. "This wasn't about the money. This was about ending the harassment."
The incident that put Pena over the edge was an early 1998 encounter during which, he said, he overheard a co-worker who often used racial slurs against him tell a supervisor "one of these days someone is going to blow his brains out. That (expletive) Pena deserves to die."
Pena, a U.S. citizen who can trace his ancestry to Mexico, had protested his treatment before, but never as strenuously as after that incident. He said his supervisors did little, if anything, to end the harassment.
On June 22 of this year, an Ingham County jury agreed - saying Pena's supervisors were aware of the abuse and failed to adequately address the situation.
The road commission plans to appeal the verdict, but officials would not comment on details.
Plenty of other cases are pending nationwide. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported a backlog of 40,234 discrimination cases at the end of 1999. Even though that is a 15-year low, agency officials said it has dwindled primarily because of a new mediation system that is pushing cases along more quickly.
"People who believe discrimination is a relic of history in this country have their heads in the sand," said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan American Civil Liberties Union based in Detroit. "It is a pervasive problem, on many levels."
Pena still works at the Ingham County Road Commission's Mason garage, where he's been employed since 1987. He said many of his co-workers have been supportive, but a few had verbally harassed him since his second week on the job. Now, those who abused him rarely talk to him at all.
The 5-foot-8-inch, 240 pound youth sports coach said he sued only because he felt he had exhausted his efforts to address the situation within the road commission.
The Ingham County jury awarded Pena $650,000 for damages he has already suffered, and another $650,000 in anticipation of future damages. The verdict has not yet been finalized as a judicial order, and will be the subject of a July 19 hearing before Judge Carolyn Stell, which is standard procedure.
"There are legal matters still pending, so we're running everything through our legal counsel," said Joe Pulver, the road commission's director of operations.
Other co-workers on Friday either declined to comment or could not be reached for comment.
Larry Salstrom, an attorney representing the road commission, said an appeal of the judgment is planned.
Both Pulver and Salstrom declined to discuss specifics of the case. But the suit may have contributed to some policy changes at the road commission.
Several months after Pena's suit was filed in May 1998, the road commission adopted a code of conduct for its employees. The document states employees are expected to "treat the public, their co-workers, supervisors and contracts with courtesy and respect." The code also details "inappropriate conduct" such as obscene language, racial slurs and harassment. Employees who violate the code, it reads, are "subject to progressive disciplinary action up to and including discharge."
Road commission officials would not say this week whether any employees have been disciplined as a result of the Pena case.
Pena said he was routinely cursed and called racial slurs, sometimes with supervisors present.
In 1997, according to court documents, a white co-worker assigned to a job with Pena said to a supervisor while in Pena's presence: "I'm sick of this. You gotta send a white man out with a Mexican to do the job right."
After the early 1998 meeting in which a co-worker said Pena should be shot, Pena asked supervisors to end the abuse.
They did nothing, he says.
The same co-worker threatened a white supervisor a few weeks later and was fired, but that dismissal was related to the threatening of the supervisor, not Pena, according to Pena's court complaint.
Pena said a supervisor told him: "There are people here who don't want Mexicans, blacks or women working here. You've got to live with it."
Pena said the harassment grew worse after he filed the suit.
Pena's attorney, James Fett of Pinckney, has specialized in discrimination cases since the mid-1980s.
"I had never seen or read about a case as bad as this one," Fett said. "I'm here to tell you, harassment in the workplace is alive and well in the United States."
In November, an Oakland County jury awarded $1.5 million to IBM employee Len Gilmer, who said he was passed over for promotion because of his race.
In May, a General Motors group leader at a Pontiac plant confronted two black co-workers while wearing a Ku Klux Klan-type outfit. GM said it is taking unspecified disciplinary action against the man.
Last week, the EEOC sued an Arizona company over sexual harassment and national origin discrimination on behalf of 27 female employees.
Last month, the EEOC won a $1 million settlement of a sexual harassment case against a Maryland food processing plant.
"Even though it is the year 2000, we're still hearing about these kinds of cases," said Rene Hinojosa, a director with the Julian Semora Research Institute at Michigan State University, specializing in Latino issues. "There have been improvements, and the discrimination is usually subtle. But it's still there."
