Pair Fired for Looking Out for Themselves

“I hate to sound egotistical, but we were the best employees they had,” says Rosemary Holifield, former collections manager.

“And they kept telling us that, even when they were firing us,” says Rae Lynn Wiggins, former inventory controller.

Recounting what happened to them at Toyota of Garden Grove, Rosemary and Rae Lynn sound a little incredulous still. They talk of the quick promotions and steady raises in their 1 1/2 years on the job. The dealership named both women employees of the month and Rae Lynn, employee of the year.

“We hated to lose them,” says Gus Hurst, general manager of Toyota of Garden Grove.

The issue, ostensibly, is parking. The dealership says it fired the women because they broke company policy by not parking their cars in a city lot.

The women say they could not, that they refused to endanger their lives. They say the dealership laughed at them and belittled their fears.

Rosemary, 45, and Rae Lynn, 21, have just filed a lawsuit against the dealership in the hope that the court will straighten things out. They are seeking an unspecified dollar amount. Hurst calls the lawsuit frivolous and doesn’t see how the women can possibly win.

“I don’t want anything to happen to anybody,” says Rae Lynn. “If I don’t say anything and something happens to somebody, I would feel responsible.”

Already one woman--not a dealership employee--was knifed and raped in the parking lot, which is behind the football field bleachers at Bolsa Grande High School in Garden Grove Park. A suspect in the case, a paroled rapist, escaped from an Orange County Sheriff’s Department bus last fall and remains at large.

The woman was raped in September while Rosemary and Rae Lynn were still working at Toyota of Garden Grove. News of the crime shocked them, and other employees as well.

“We used to tell the bosses that we were scared,” Rae Lynn says. “They used to act as if we were exaggerating.”

“They are as safe here as they are in a mall or a parking lot anywhere in the city,” the general manager says.

Dealership employees can reach the parking lot only after walking through a tunnel under the Garden Grove Freeway. The tunnel is dark and it smells. A transient who used to spend his time there and under the bleachers was found dead in the area last year. Police say it was murder; the case is unsolved.

“After they found that body was when we really started to get scared,” Rosemary says. She began parking her car on the street in front of the dealership then.

Unlike upper management, most of them men, neither Rosemary nor Rae Lynn was allowed to park on the dealership grounds.

And then Rae Lynn was accosted herself. She was on her way to the dealership one morning last fall, about 10 a.m. A man who had been whistling and yelling at her blocked her entrance to the tunnel and wouldn’t let her pass.

Rae Lynn ran back toward an elderly security guard, hired by the dealership, who had been sitting in his car in the parking lot. The man finally fled.

“When I got to work I was really shaken,” Rae Lynn says. “All of upper management was told; the word spread fast. They made everybody go get their cars right then and told us to park them on the street. They said we could park there from now on. . . .

“So I felt very safe. You still had to watch what you were doing, of course. But I felt like they were taking me seriously. Then things changed. The dealership next door opened.”

Toyota of Garden Grove, fearing that its employees were taking up parking spaces that customers might need, ordered the women back to the remote lot.

The dealership said it would come up with a parking solution soon. Rosemary and Rae Lynn say that was merely a stall. They say an offer to “valet park” their cars wasn’t acceptable because they would be liable for any damage that a dealership driver might cause.

In the meantime, other employees, including a young man, were reportedly attacked and harassed in the lot.

Then on April 10, the dealership owner called Rosemary and Rae Lynn in together. He told them, again, that he was working on a solution to the parking problem. Both women say they were encouraged that something would be done soon. Within the hour, however, both women were let go.

Rae Lynn says that when he fired her, Gus Hurst said that her unwillingness to park in the remote lot “is like a slap in the face to me.”

Each woman’s termination notice said she had “refused any of the alternatives offered and in an act of defiance, parked her vehicle in front of the dealership and refused to move it.”

“It was totally ego,” Rae Lynn says. “They refused to let a couple of women get the better of them.”

Yet now neither Rae Lynn or Rosemary has found another job. Rosemary is a single mother of a 15-year-old daughter. Rae Lynn is married to an Orange County sheriff’s deputy. Both women are receiving unemployment insurance; the dealership’s request to deny them that was overruled by the unemployment office.

The California Labor Commission and the state OSHA office are investigating the women’s complaint as well.

Regardless of the outcome of their case, Rosemary and Rae Lynn say they did what was right. Too many others, they say, are afraid to speak out; they don’t want to lose jobs that they are thankful to have.

Rosemary and Rae Lynn say the same goes for themselves. They’ve never been fired before. It doesn’t look good. But the alternative, they say, is worse.