Workers Fight Back : Suing Employers for Discrimination Can Be Grueling

For years, Sam Harris had a gut feeling that something was wrong in his accountant job at Hughes Aircraft Co. The something turned out to be racial discrimination.

Last year, Harris, who is black, won a $1.4-million racial discrimination and wrongful termination suit against Hughes, and he is using the money as a grubstake to buy foreclosed homes as he tries a new career as a landlord.

After Harris was laid off from his job, it took four years for his case to worm its way through the legal system. Meanwhile, he went through a divorce and scratched out a living as a house painter. But in the end, Harris, 40, says he taught Hughes Aircraft a lesson: “They figured, here’s another guy who will take whatever we give him and not have anything to say about it.”

Whether it is because of corporate downsizing, job quotas, age, gender, disability or race biases in the workplace, sometimes workers find that the only way to protect themselves is to sue their employer. Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission office in Los Angeles handled 2,740 new charges of discrimination, and that is expected to rise 10% this year.

Million-dollar legal awards make for big news stories, but most cases do not end up that way. And anybody who sues an employer should prepare for his or her life to take a quick U-turn, says Joseph Posner, an Encino labor attorney. Posner no longer takes cases if a client still works with a problem employer.

“It’s difficult to work for a company if you are in the process of suing. Word gets around. The person becomes a pariah,” Posner said.

Sometimes, though, the law is the only line of defense. That is what Harris decided in 1989 when Hughes Aircraft in Canoga Park laid him off from his $33,000-a-year job as part of the company’s general downsizing. Harris had been with the company for 11 years, but he found that he was underpaid compared to white workers in similar positions with even less experience than he had. Harris remembers getting a promotion once, but he did not get a raise, and he complained to his boss that it was “like having a birthday cake without the icing.”

At Harris’ trial, it also came out that when he started attending black caucus meetings held by Hughes’ workers, his boss wanted Harris to report back to her about those meetings. He refused. At one point, after Harris won a strong performance evaluation, that same boss ordered Harris’ supervisor to water down the appraisal.

Fighting a large bureaucracy is not easy, but Harris believes he helped his legal case by collecting a large cache of job records. “I was a Xeroxing fool around there,” Harris said. “I had all the salaries and everybody’s job description. I knew I was underpaid.”

Harris won his Superior Court trial in 1992; Hughes lost again in the appeals court, and the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Harris’ final victory “gave Sam a sense of self-respect because he was able to prove discrimination,” said his attorney, Jonathan Biddle.

But it can take a long time to prove your point in a courtroom. Consider construction executive Robert Hunio, who stopped working before Harris did, but is still sweating out his legal case. Hunio, 63, said he was forced to quit his $104,000-a-year job as vice president at Tishman Construction Corp. of California in 1988 after 27 years with the company--a victim, he contends, of age discrimination and harassment.

Things went awry, he says, when he was in charge of a construction project and asked to be replaced after not getting along well with the owner. “From that moment on, I was persona non grata ,” Hunio said. He was assigned small projects, and “he was compelled to stay in a glass office and read magazines while the company hired [younger] workers to do what he was qualified to do and rumors were spread that he was on the way out,” said his attorney, Philip J. Ganz.

After that, Hunio fell into severe depression and spent several days in a mental hospital. Since then, he has found an occasional consulting job, but mostly he has relied on his wife’s secretarial income, and they have borrowed against their home for money to live on.

One hard fact Hunio has learned is that once you sue an employer, your reputation tags along. On job interviews he would hear: “What horrible misdeed did you do?” Hunio said it was obvious that other firms wondered, “Why should they get involved with me because I’ve sued my former employer. It’s like having a red A on your forehead.”

So far, Hunio has been on the winning side in court. He won a $6.7-million judgment against Tishman in Superior Court, and in February an appeals court ruled in his favor. But Tishman’s attorney has filed a petition to the state Supreme Court to review the case. After so many years, Hunio keeps hoping that Tishman “will settle up, and we can go on with our lives.”

Even those who win their cases often are left with painful memories. Dan Sperling was a Burger King restaurant manager, but an auto accident left him a quadriplegic. After a lot of physical therapy, he showed up at Burger King’s office looking for a job.

“They told me, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ ” Sperling said. He had learned how to move about in a special chair and could drive, but, he said, “they looked at my disability and felt, ‘here’s a person who’ll just sit and watch TV.’ ”

Attorney Posner took on Sperling’s case, and while the legal process unfolded, Sperling borrowed money from his mother’s estate and bought a Jack In The Box restaurant in LeMoore in the San Joaquin Valley. He had to make some alterations, such as widening a few doors so his wheelchair could get in and moving tables so he could reach office equipment. “But the changes were exceedingly minor,” he said.

At the trial, Posner showed a day-in-the-life videotape that followed Sperling around as he rolled out of the driveway, got out of his truck, managed his restaurant and greeted customers. Sperling won $365,000 in damages from Burger King in 1989, less Posner’s cut. (Posner said he typically gets 35% to 40% of an award.)

Today, life is good for Sperling. He owns three Jack In The Box restaurants, has more than 100 employees and he and his wife have just adopted a little boy. But he remembers the four years of legal agony. “The pressure really became heavy on me and my wife during the trial,” Sperling said. “It was not an experience I wish to repeat.”

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Laying the Groundwork

Workplace attorneys offer the following tips for employees who are thinking of suing their employers:

* Keep documentation of anything dealing with your change in employment.

* On the job, be alert to whether you have been discriminated against or are a victim of harassment based on gender, age, race, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation.

* Have you been harassed because your employer engaged in illegal activity?

* Pay attention to the reasons your employer gives for firing or mistreating you, and whether that explanation appears to be the real reason or is a pretext to mask something else.

* If you have a work-related case, file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the state Fair Employment and Housing Department.