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EEOC Filing Fewer Discrimination Cases In Arkansas

4 min read

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Kroger Co. of Cincinnati in federal court in Arkansas last month over allegations that one of the grocer’s North Little Rock employees was the target of sexual harassment.

A week after that filing, the EEOC filed another lawsuit against a Pine Bluff restaurant for allegedly subjecting a black employee to a hostile work environment.

But those two lawsuits are the only cases that the EEOC has filed in the state this calendar year, continuing a recent trend line. In 2011, the EEOC filed six lawsuits in Arkansas’ federal courts and three the following year. Last year, the EEOC filed only two lawsuits against companies operating in the state.

“These things are cyclical,” said Pamela Dixon, senior trial attorney at the Little Rock office of the EEOC.

The number of complaints the EEOC has received in Arkansas, though, has been up and down. The EEOC received 1,666 complaints in the state in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2011, 2,374 in fiscal 2012 and 1,524 in fiscal 2013.

Dixon said the EEOC finds no cause in most of the complaints it receives. In the cases where cause is found, “the commission looks at them for litigation,” she said.

Winning an EEOC lawsuit, however, could be tough because there’s usually not a smoking gun from the employer.

“Very seldom are you going to find direct evidence where you find the memo, ‘I’m terminating Sally because she’s pregnant,’” Dixon said.

Still, some comments could be used to support the EEOC’s case.

“It might be as innocuous as, ‘Gosh, I’m going to have a hard time finding anybody to replace you or work your schedule while you’re out,” Dixon said. “That’s not direct evidence, but maybe you can draw an inference from it.”

She said that she’s seen a trend of complaints from employees who were fired after they became pregnant.

She said a lot of times employers thinks they’re doing the worker a favor by firing them because they don’t want the employee or the baby to get injured.

“It’s really a decision that needs to be made between the woman and her doctor,” Dixon said.

And it could be costly for the employer.

In July, Triple T Foods – Arkansas, which has its headquarters in Frontenac, Kansas, agreed to pay a former employee $30,000 over allegations that it fired her because of her pregnancy.

Triple T Foods, which processes meat byproducts used in pet food at its plant in Springdale, agreed to the consent decree, but that doesn’t mean that it admitted to the allegations in the EEOC’s lawsuit. Rather, both sides agreed to enter into the decree “to avoid the additional expense that continued litigation of this case would involve,” according to the filing.

Triple T Foods also agreed to provide pregnancy discrimination awareness training to all supervisory and management employees at its Springdale plant. An attorney for Triple T, Robert Rhoads

of Fayetteville, said he wasn’t authorized by his client to comment.

Cautionary Tales

The lawsuits the EEOC filed last month could be seen as cautionary tales for businesses.

The EEOC accused Kroger of failing to take appropriate measures to protect a “courtesy clerk” from sexual harassment.

The lawsuit said a female clerk was 15 when she was hired in 2009. At some point, the lawsuit alleges, another worker, Jason Womack, began making comments of a “sexual nature.”

Over a period of more than two years, the clerk complained to management and even filed a complaint to Kroger’s hotline, but Womack wasn’t fired. The clerk suffered an anxiety attack and went to an emergency room when she discovered that she would have to continue working with Womack, the lawsuit said.

The EEOC is seeking an unspecified amount of damages from Kroger.

In the lawsuit against H2H Enterprises of Pine Bluff, which does business as Huddle House Inc. #670, the EEOC charged that the company’s senior vice president of operations, Tyler Brown, and region manager, Jason Beard, subjected a shift leader and server, Angela Whitfield, to “offensive and unwelcome racially derogatory name-calling.”

“Examples of the racially derogatory names include ‘hood,’ ‘hood rat,’ ‘ghetto’ and ‘Huddle Hoes.’”

Whitfield complained about the treatment during the summer of 2012, but no action was taken, the lawsuit said.

The EEOC is suing for an unspecified amount of money for Whitfield for the alleged violations.

Neither Kroger nor Huddle House had filed a response as of Thursday, and neither company returned messages seeking comment.

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