Kia Franklin
You’ve got to be kidding me…
Suit claims bias in strip searches. The EEOC is suing a restaurant chain for strip searching 3 employees in the case of some missing money from a cash register. One would think it would be enough that management personally conducted the strip search of their employees, and that when employees complained they were fired. Unfortunately, there’s more:
…The lawsuit alleges that the company discriminated against the workers “because of their race and then terminated them from their employment in retaliation for complaining about the discriminatory activity.”…The general manager, who was not named in the lawsuit, then told them he had “the right to search them.”
“As long as we worked for Krystal, he said he had the right to search our purse, our car, us as long as we were on Krystal property,” Hill said.
…Meanwhile, the unidentified white cashier whose cash register was in question “violated company policy when she left for the day without having management count down her drawer,” the suit alleges. Counting a cash drawer is standard cash-handling procedure.
The woman returned a short time later because she had forgotten her purse. When told of the missing money, the workers said, the woman began crying. The general manager told her: “Don’t worry about it. I’ve got this. You go on home,” according to the four black workers. The woman never returned to work after that, the workers said.
The white cashier previously received a written reprimand when money was missing from her cash drawer in a separate, earlier incident, said Dawkins of the EEOC.
…The lawsuit seeks back pay, interest, compensatory and punitive damages, as well as changes in practices.
—Tammy Joyner writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Read full article here)
Posted at 5:06 PM, Feb 07, 2008 in Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
Comments
Kia opposes the shopkeeper's privilege. As lawyers do, the left wing, biased ideologue at the predatory, productive entity plundering EEOC supports crime, being a criminal lover lawyer. The criminal lover lawyer opposes the legal privilege of any but the criminal lover lawyer.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | February 7, 2008 11:27 PM
Thanks for your insightful critique of racial discrimination and the violation of employees' privacy rights.
Posted by: Kia | February 8, 2008 05:07 PM
IF the allegations are true, criminal (not civil) sanctions should be levied against those responsible possibly including prison time. Civil litigation is inappropriate because the economic damages are minimal (Krystal is a minimum wage employer)and I don't think someone's hurt feelings are quantifiable - 25 cents is at lest as accurate a remedy as $25K or $25M and hence renders any sort of monetary award as a mere exercise in speculation
Throwing the bastards in jail, however, that will get their attention
Posted by: Paul W Dennis | February 8, 2008 08:59 PM
Paul: Please, review the brief article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper's_privilege
The application of the elements of the privilege to this case is a function of a jury, and not of biased, left wing, fact hating, criminal lover, land pirates.
Posted by: Supremacy Claus | February 9, 2008 11:01 AM
SC, this shopkeeper law does not extend to private citizens the power of search. What they did was illegal.
Paul, I don't know enough about criminal law to know what they'd be prosecuted for but I'm all for it. But I do know that if the allegations are true then this was a clear case of racial discrimination, in which case civil litigation is wholly appropriate, regardless of how large the economic damages. Getting a large jury award is not the point. The point is, if you do something like this, you will pay for it, literally and from an ethical/social standpoint.
Don't minimize the attack on human dignity that is racism, and the humiliation of being strip searched, by calling it something as harmless as "someone's hurt feelings". They didn't call the employees boo boo heads, the managers coerced them into a strip search and took advantage of the fact that employees didn't understand this was not the management's legal right.
And it ain't that unquantifiable. We all know no one would feel adequately compensated for being humiliated because of the color of their skin, if their perpetrator only had to toss them a quarter for it.
And it's quantifiable if you think about the employees who walked out, and the cost of lost productivity for their walk out. If every act of workplace racism had an impact on the bottom line, employers would find a way to reduce the effects of racism in the workplace. This civil suit advances that goal.
And it sends a moral message. Our laws do not condone racial discrimination. So even if the heinous act of strip searching the employees didn't occur, even if the employer instead merely fired them on the spot, justice must be served.
So let the jury decide. Let them engage in this mere exercise in speculation.
Posted by: Kia | February 11, 2008 10:57 AM