Trial to Begin on Engineers’ Charges of Bias at Rockwell

When industrial engineers Calvin Green, 42, and Johnnie Pulley, 43, were fired from their jobs at Rockwell International’s Palmdale plant in November, 1983, they were told they had been terminated for lying on their job applications about their salaries at their previous jobs.

But Green and Pulley, who are both black, say that Rockwell officials fired them because they complained about racial discrimination by their supervisor and filed a grievance with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In a civil trial in San Fernando Superior Court scheduled to start next week, Pulley and Green are seeking compensatory and punitive damages for wrongful termination and the racial discrimination they say they experienced at Rockwell.

In pretrial court hearings, Rockwell attorneys have argued that the company had a legal right to fire the two engineers because they inflated the amount they had earned at the Boeing Co. in their applications for jobs with Rockwell. Rockwell said the engineers’ salaries were based in part on what they said they had been paid and that providing any false information is grounds for firing.

But Green and Pulley say the aerospace company never would have looked for or cared about the discrepancy on their applications had they not complained about racial harassment at the company.

“Rockwell didn’t care about the precision on the hourly salaries. If there really was a concern about a discrepancy in the salary, why did it take them nine months to find it out,” said attorney J. Jeffrey Long, who is representing the two engineers in court. “They got these complaints, and they said, ‘We are getting rid of those guys. We are going to get even with them.’ ”

Long says that Rockwell officials reviewed the engineers’ job applications to find a basis for firing them on Nov. 18, 1983, the day the company learned that Green and Pulley had filed an EEOC grievance.

Although Rockwell in court documents has contended that the two engineers inflated their salaries by nearly $2 an hour, Long said his clients only misstated their salaries by a few cents.

But, he said, when Rockwell officials called to confirm the engineers’ salaries, Boeing officials gave a far lower figure, which did not include cost of living increases and merit raises the two men had received. The engineers had included those increases in the salaries they reported to Rockwell.

According to Long and court records, Green and Pulley were both recruited from Boeing and in March, 1983, began working at Rockwell’s Palmdale facility helping design a manufacturing process for the B-1 bomber.

Green and Pulley contend that they were harassed by their supervisor because they are black. They say he shouted at them and criticized them unnecessarily, threatened them with charges of insubordination and gave them unreasonable work assignments.

Long said the supervisor’s harassment culminated one Saturday in October, 1983, when he assigned Green and Pulley an extensive project that he said had to be completed by Monday morning.

The engineers said in court records that they worked all weekend on the task, although they felt it was impossible to complete in such a short period. On Monday, the supervisor assigned eight more employees to work with Green and Pulley on the project and gave the group until Friday to finish.

After this incident, Pulley and Green complained to a Rockwell personnel officer that they felt their supervisor knowingly was making impossible demands on them. They filed the EEOC grievance and shortly thereafter were fired, court records show.