Fired Executive Wins Race-Bias Award Against Company : Discrimination: The man, who is white, will collect $320,000 from Japanese-owned AIS of Mission Viejo.
An Orange County jury has awarded $320,000 to a Lake Forest man who sued a Japanese-owned company alleging that he was fired because he is white.
George A. Dalinger, a Canadian citizen, claimed in a lawsuit that Adaptive Information Systems of Mission Viejo fired him seven months after his hiring in 1991.
Though jurors awarded $320,000 in compensatory damages, they found that the company, which is partly owned by the Hitachi Corp., had not acted maliciously.
Dalinger’s attorney, James L. Crandall of Irvine, said his client was pleased with the jury’s decision.
“The verdict says that Japanese companies, when they come to America, have to follow American rules regarding racial discrimination,” Crandall said. “If you’re going to do business in California, you’re going to obey the laws.”
Andrew Gelb, an attorney for the company, which assembles and sells imaging systems, said his clients do not believe that they did anything wrong in dismissing Dalinger. Company officials maintain that they terminated Dalinger because the company was experiencing “financial difficulties,” the lawyer said.
“Obviously, we are disappointed with the jury’s decision,” Gelb said, “but our disappointment is tempered by the satisfaction that jurors rejected Dalinger’s exaggerated claims that AIS acted with malice.”
In early 1991, Dalinger was hired to a $93,000-a-year job as the company’s director of product planning. He earned a favorable performance evaluation, but he was fired shortly thereafter when he decided to use American-made components in the company’s Japanese-manufactured imaging systems, Crandall said.
In his lawsuit, Dalinger said that company officials fired him “based on corporate policy that only because Japanese employees had a superior intellect, only Japanese employees could implement new projects.”
He said company officials were “hostile to any research and development conducted by a Caucasian as opposed to a Japanese” employee.
The trial before Superior Court Judge Mason L. Fenton lasted 10 days.
Gelb said his clients were considering an appeal.
