Pepsi Beverages Pays $3.1M in Racial Bias Case

By Sam Hananel, Associated Press, Jan. 12, 2012

Pepsi Beverages Co. will pay $3.1 million to settle federal charges of race discrimination for using criminal background checks to screen out job applicants — even if they weren't convicted of a crime.

The settlement announced Wednesday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is part of a national government crackdown on hiring policies that can hurt blacks and Hispanics.

EEOC officials said the company's policy of not hiring workers with arrest records disproportionately excluded more than 300 black applicants. The policy barred applicants who had been arrested, but not convicted of a crime, and denied employment to others who were convicted of minor offenses.

Using arrest and conviction records to deny employment can be illegal if it's irrelevant for the job, according to the EEOC, which enforces the nation's employment discrimination laws. The agency says such blanket policies can limit job opportunities for minorities with higher arrest and conviction rates than whites.

The company has since adopted a new criminal background policy and plans to make jobs available to victims of the old policy if they are still interested in jobs at Pepsi and are qualified for the openings.

"I commend Pepsi's willingness to reexamine its policy and modify it to ensure that unwarranted roadblocks to employment are removed," EEOC Chairwoman Jacqueline Berrien said in a statement.

Pepsi Beverage spokesman Dave DeCecco said the company's criminal background check policy has always been neutral and that the EEOC did not find any intentional discrimination. He said after the issue was first raised in 2006, the company worked with the EEOC to revise its background check process "to create a workplace that is as diverse and inclusive as possible."

"We are committed to promoting diversity and inclusion and we have been widely recognized for our efforts for decades," DeCecco said.

He said the new policy would take a more "individualized approach" in considering the applicant's criminal history against the particular job being sought.

Pepsi Beverages is PepsiCo's beverage manufacturing, sales and distribution operating unit in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Under the settlement, the company will provide the EEOC with regular reports on its hiring practices and offer antidiscrimination training to its hiring personnel and managers.

About 73 percent of major employers report that they always check on applicants' criminal records, while 19 percent do so for select job candidates, according to a 2010 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management.

But increased federal scrutiny of such policies has led some companies to reevaluate their hiring process. Pamela Devata, a Chicago employment lawyer who has represented companies trying to comply with EEOC's requirements, said there has been an uptick over the past year in EEOC charges over the use of background checks.

"The EEOC has taken a very aggressive enforcement posture on the use of criminal background and criminal history," Devata said.

The commission held a special meeting on the topic last summer, and Devata said employers have been expecting the EEOC to issue more specific guidance.

EEOC officials have said, for example, that an old drunken driving conviction may not be relevant to a clerical job, but a theft conviction may disqualify someone from working at a bank.

Julie Schmid, acting director of the EEOC's Minneapolis office, said the EEOC recommends that employers consider the nature and gravity of offenses, the time that has passed since conviction or completion of a sentence, and the nature of the job sought.

"We hope that employers with unnecessarily broad criminal background check policies take note of this agreement and reassess their policies to ensure compliance" with antidiscrimination laws, Schmid said in a written statement.

Calif. Car Washes Agree to $1 Million Back Pay Settlement

January 12th, 2012 | Mike Hall

Eight California car washes agreed to an historic $1 million settlement with the state’s attorney general for routinely failing to pay minimum wage or overtime, creating false records of work hours and not paying money owed to employees who quit, according to Attorney General Kamala Harris.

Workers at these car washes were taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers who illegally denied them the pay and benefits they earned. I am pleased that the resolution of this case will allow workers to receive the pay they are owed.

At least $800,000 of the settlement will go to workers who were underpaid, according to court records. Other parts of the settlement will pay taxes and penalties. Click here for a copy of the settlement agreement.

Two of the of the car washes in the agreement are Bonus Car Wash in Santa Monica and Marina Car Washin Venice, where workers fought and won recognition with United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 last year. Says Local 75?s Dave Campbell:

We are glad that the Attorney General is taking seriously the issue of wage theft among car wash workers. Workers have been waiting to be made whole for past violations for years.

The workers there and at other Southern California carwashes came together in the CLEAN Carwash Campaign to fight for their rights. The CLEAN Carwash Campaign is a coalition supported by the USW, the AFL-CIO and more than 100 community, faith and labor organizations in Los Angeles. For more information, click here.

More good news from the Clean Carwash Campaign: the owner of Navas Car Wash in Marina Del Ray, the successor company to BJ Car Wash, agreed to respect and sign the union contract agreed to by the previous owner and ratified in early November.

This blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO Now blog on January 11, 2012. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and has written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. “When my collar was still blue, I carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. I’ve also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold my blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent. You may have seen me at one of several hundred Grateful Dead shows. I was the one with longhair and the tie-dye. Still have the shirts, lost the hair.”

Chicago Woman Fired for Doing Work at Lunch Wins Unemployment Claim

By SUSANNA KIM (@skimm)

Jan. 17, 2012

Sharon Smiley had worked for 10 years as a receptionist and administrative assistant at a Chicago real estate company until she was fired for skipping lunch one day. After a two-year battle, an appeals court in Illinois has found that denial of her unemployment benefits was "clearly erroneous."

Smiley, 48, punched out of work for lunch Jan. 28, 2010, but remained at her desk to finish a project assigned by a manager because she did not plan to eat that day, she said.

Smiley, who had passed her 10-year anniversary with the company more than a month before, said another manager told her it was time for her to go to lunch and step away from her desk, but she refused. That manager observed Smiley working on a spreadsheet on her computer, answering the phone and responding to questions by people who approached her desk, according to a filing from the appellate court of Illinois.

Her former employer, Equity Lifestyle Properties Inc., did not return a request for comment.
The company's human resources director then became involved, explaining that hourly non-exempt employees were required to take a 30-minute lunch break, a policy that had been in the company handbook for 10 years, according to the filing. Not following the policy would be a violation of Illinois' labor laws, the HR director said.

The prominent location of Smiley's desk, "which was directly at the front door of the office, made this particularly important for her," according to the human resources director in the court filing. She and Smiley had "many discussions ... over her eating breakfast at her desk," the filing states.

"I knew you couldn't eat lunch at your desk," Smiley told ABC News. "I was under the impression that because I was punched out I could do what I want."

Smiley said her job had became so stressful that she suffered a stroke and was off work for almost three months, beginning July 13, 2009, according to the court filing.

Like several states, Illinois has a law that requires employers to provide employees a lunch break. But the law cannot be read to require an employer to fire a worker who refuses to take a break in order to finish her work, said Michael LeRoy, law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Nonetheless, Illinois is an employment-at-will state, which means the employer can fire someone for a good reason, no reason, or a bad reason, as long as it is not discriminatory," he said.

Companies often have policies that are designed to limit the number of hours employees can work in a given day or week, largely in order to avoid overtime pay obligations, Cheryl Anderson, law professor with Southern Illinois University School of Law, said. Such policies often require employer permission to work beyond an employee's regular scheduled hours.

After being fired, Smiley learned she was ineligible for unemployment benefits because she had been discharged for misconduct connected with her work.

She appealed to the Illinois Department of Employment Security's board of review three times, was denied, then took her case to a circuit court. That court ruled Smiley, who did not challenge the firing, was eligible for benefits.

Smiley received a check with a lump sum on Nov. 28 for several months of unemployment, a percentage of her previous salary. Then she received a check every two weeks for $528 until she obtained her latest job last month.

The appellate court of Illinois affirmed the circuit court ruling Jan. 11, saying the "insubordination arose from [Smiley's] efforts to perform additional work for [her employer], beyond what was required of her," as first reported Monday in the Chicago Tribune.

"The insubordination occurred in a meeting with her superiors which lasted only four minutes," the court ruling stated.

The court ruling also said there was evidence that managers had been able to work with her in the past to perform new tasks with which she was uncomfortable.

An unemployed person in Illinois is qualified for unemployment unless there is misconduct, which "has been defined as conduct evincing such willful or wanton disregard of an employer's interests," according to the state's legal test in a ruling from the board of review.

"Workers generally have to be guilty of gross misconduct, which includes insubordination," professor Anderson said. "The bar is set high for the employer to prove that, and in this case, the court found the employer's argument that her actions amounted to insubordination to be inadequate." 

      

In the case that established the precedent in 1987, an ambulance driver was fired after having four minor accidents in three months backing up a vehicle. The hearing officer and state agency denied his unemployment claim, but the state supreme court said the law requires "evil design" or wanton disregard of its interests, and that test was not satisfied.

"If the ambulance driver with four accidents in three months qualified for a benefit, then by implication, Ms. Smiley did, too," professor LeRoy said.

After nine months of unemployment, Smiley obtained a similar job at another company on Dec. 13. She said her new employer has a more liberal lunch policy.

"They told me I could sit at my desk, I could be at my computer during lunch, or I could look at magazines. And in my area, they have two flat-screen TVs on the wall," she said with a chuckle.

Hotel Workers Stiffed Millions In Wages, Lawsuit Alleges

More than a dozen low-level hotel workers in Indianapolis have filed a class-action lawsuit against ten of the city’s hotels and a labor staffing agency, claiming they were routinely cheated out of pay with the knowledge of hotel management.

The workers — most of them Hispanic immigrants employed as housekeepers, dishwashers and bussers — say they were forced to work off the clock and through their unpaid breaks, sometimes pushing their earnings below the minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. The suit could potentially involve more than a thousand workers and millions of dollars in claims, according to the hotel workers union UNITE HERE, which is organizing workers in Indianapolis.

The employees named in the suit worked for a labor agency called Hospitality Staffing Solutions (HSS), which provides lower-rung workers to hotel companies like Hyatt on a temporary basis in cities across the country. On its website, HSS  declares itself a client’s “secret weapon for improving service while cutting costs — 12% annually, on average.”

A HuffPost report in August chronicled how the outsourcing of work to HSS has led to a two-class system within certain hotels, as lesser-paid agency workers toil alongside better-compensated direct hires. Several Indianapolis hotel workers told HuffPost then that the agency shorted them on their wages and threatened them with dismissal if they couldn’t finish their work in the allotted time. The CEO of HSS said at the time that any instances of unpaid wages were honest mistakes and that the company took the allegations seriously.

Management at Georgia-based HSS could not immediately be reached for comment. This isn’t the first time the company has been sued by workers. A former manager in Pittsburgh once filed a lawsuit claiming he was fired because he stood up for housekeepers who weren’t being paid what they were owed. The company has also been criticized for an advertisement it ran in a hotel trade publication that showed tiny workers inside a vending machine, apparently ready for purchase.

The HSS-staffed hotels named in the Indianapolis lawsuit include Embassy Suites, Marriott, Westin, Hyatt, Holiday Inn and Omni properties.

Martha Gonzalez, 28, one of the workers now suing, tells HuffPost she worked at Hyatt and Marriott properties as an HSS employee earning the minimum wage. She says that she was required to come in early and prepare her housekeeping cart before punching in, and that she often wound up working through her lunch break or clocking out to finish work at the end of the day, to avoid being punished. She says she quit last summer.

“I was sick of getting a check that didn’t meet my family’s needs,” Gonzalez, who’s from Mexico, says through a translator. “Every check was just too small. I was so tired of working in a place under pressure, getting calls from the manager, ‘Are you finished? Are you finished?’”

Plaintiff Anastasia Amantecatl, who worked for HSS as a housekeeper at a Marriott, claims that she was compelled to show up two hours before her shift actually started each day. “This was necessary for her to complete her required number of rooms for the day,” the lawsuit states. “She was not compensated for this time nor was she paid the required overtime premium for this time.” The lawsuit alleges that between 20 and 25 housekeepers found themselves in a similar situation at the hotel.

Many hotel workers in Indianapolis have told HuffPost that their workloads have increased in recent years as their wages have remained flat or even gone down. Workers and their advocates partly blame the outsourcing of previously in-house jobs for deteriorating work conditions.

A hotel company can save money by shifting some of its workforce to a company like HSS, since it would no longer be responsible for providing costly worker benefits. But workers employed by labor agencies are technically temps, sometimes going years on end without receiving health coverage or pay raises. Similar temp outsourcing has become widespread in the warehousing and logistics industries, where many workers blame the temp model for their low wages and lack of benefits.

Officials with UNITE HERE argue that the outsourcing at hotels has hidden costs for the city and state, such as the taxpayer-funded health care that many agency workers’ families end up using. “I don’t think the taxpayers of Indianapolis should be the ones to subsidize these workers because these corporations don’t want to [provide] living wages and benefits,” Becky Smith, a union organizer, told HuffPost last summer.

Salvador Perez, a 38-year-old father of two from Mexico, is also named in the hotel lawsuit. He says that he worked for HSS for the last few months of 2011, earning the $7.25 minimum wage as a dishwasher. He claims he would regularly work a 40-hour week but end up being paid only for 35. He says he’s suing with his colleagues to recover back wages and “end the exploitation that’s happening at hotels downtown.”

“We struggled to pay for diapers for our baby,” Perez says. “We had to go to food pantries and churches to feed our families. They always said, ‘It’ll come with the next check, it’ll come with the next check.’ But it didn’t.”

About the Author: David Jamieson is the Huffington Post’s workplace reporter.Before joining the D.C. bureau, Jamieson reported on transportation issues for local Washington news site TBD.com and covered criminal justice for Washington City Paper. He’s the author of a non-fiction book, Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, and his stories have appeared in Slate, The New Republic, The Washington Post, and Outside. A Capitol Hill resident, he’s won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Hillman Foundation’s Sidney Award.

Housekeepers Charge Hyatt Fired Them for Taking Down Their Own Photos

By Josh Eidelson

Becoming a pin-up without your permission: another downside of workplace autocracy

Passing through the halls one day in September, Martha Reyes stopped to see why a group of her Hyatt co-workers stood laughing in front of a bulletin board. Looking closer, she saw photos of her head, and those of other housekeeping employees, pasted onto bodies in swimsuits. “I got really angry,” says Reyes, seeing her face on a figure that looked “almost naked, and a very different body that wasn’t mine. I felt very humiliated and embarrassed.” Martha’s sister Lorena was also included in the beach-themed display, which Hyatt management had posted over the weekend as part of Housekeeping Appreciation Week.

Martha Reyes took down her picture and her sister’s. A month later, alleging they spent too long on their lunch break, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara fired both of them.

The sisters charge that the non-union hotel was retaliating against them over the bulletin board. Hotel workers’ union UNITE HERE (full disclosure: my former employer) is championing their cause. On November 18, the union organized a delegation of hotel workers and community leaders that joined the Reyes sisters in delivering a copy of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint to the hotel, followed by picketing outside. UNITE HERE is in a national fight with Hyatt over organizing rights at non-union hotels.

As In These Times has reported, UNITE HERE has drawn national attention to 100 non-union Hyatt workers in Boston who were abruptly replaced by a staffing company, and partnered with LGBT groups in boycotting a Hyatt hotel whose owner’s donation helped put repeal of equal marriage rights on the ballot. In September, union Hyatt workers in four cities staged a one-week strike demanding the right to do future solidarity actions while under contract. In February, the Reyes sisters and other union committee members called for a customer boycott of the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara over management’s refusal to agree to a fair organizing process.

Hyatt maintains that the Reyes’ firings were routine, and that the union is taking an opportunistic swipe at their brand. The sisters’ attorney, Adam Zapala, says that conversations with Hyatt Regency Santa Clara employees have turned up no one else who has been terminated for long lunches. He notes that many housekeepers there, faced with excessive workloads, work through their breaks and then take a longer lunch.

Hyatt insists that the posted photos were designed to celebrate housekeepers, not to make fun of them. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.) That could well be true – managers may have put up the display without ever imagining that some employees would be humiliated, rather than tickled, to see their faces juxtaposed on shapely people in bikinis.

That possibility in itself illustrates the downsides of autocracy. The Reyes sisters say the plans for Housekeeping Appreciation Week, like most decisions at the Hyatt Regency, were made with no input – let alone consent – from hourly employees. “I’m a big woman,” says Lorena Reyes, “and the photo they used isn’t my body…I never wear bikinis…those pictures made us look like clowns.” (Both sisters were interviewed in Spanish.)

Though the posting was in an employee area, its location was visible to passing employees from all departments, outside vendors, and the occasional guest. It’s difficult to know how many other employees at the non-union hotel had similar feelings but chose to stay silent rather than take the risks at-will employees face by getting on the wrong side of management. If the pin-ups themselves seem commonplace, that’s striking as well: one of 100 daily collisions between values of autonomy and the acceptance of subordination as a cost of employment.

The indignity the Reyes sisters faced – seeing your image used in a way that horrifies you, by someone who could fire you – is a stark reminder that workplace relationships are power relationships. Lest we think that was obvious, this month noted non-feminist Katie Roiphe took to the New York Times to call for more “risqué remarks” at work, with nary a mention of whether those comments were more likely to come from subordinates towards “superiors,” or the other way around. When’s the last time you saw employees pin up a photo of their boss’ head on a swimsuit model at work?

And as the Reyes’ sisters have experienced, the downsides of management autocracy don’t disappear at the end of your shift. Both sisters carried their shame and anger home with them at night. “I still feel really humiliated,” says Martha Reyes. Lorena Reyes avoided showing the image to her family out of embarrassment. They saw it for the first time when it appeared in local news.

The Hyatt Regency Santa Clara also offers a reminder that labor rights and women’s rights aren’t naturally severable. Their connection is especially obvious in housekeeping, where a usually invisible, sometimes sexualized workforce does dangerous but undervalued work. UNITE HERE members in several cities have negotiated for and won the option for employees to wear pants rather than skirts. After a UNITE HERE housekeeper charged former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn with rape, union members around the country spoke out about sexual harassment and assault by hotel guests.

“We want to make sure Hyatt does the right thing,” says Lorena Reyes, “and that they don’t humiliate women again like they did to us.”

Suit: NBA Fired Me for Relaying Women's Complaints

JENNIFER PELTZ,Associated Press
Warren Glover, NBA, Sexual Harassment, Lawsuit, Women, Basketball, Misogny

NEW YORK (AP) -- The NBA forced a security director out of his job because he stuck up for colleagues who complained of sexual harassment and discrimination, the ousted league official said in a lawsuit Thursday.

After a decade with the league, Warren Glover was fired in July "in retaliation for his continued advocacy on behalf of female employees," according to his lawsuit against the NBA and three current and former security executives.

The league hasn't seen the lawsuit, but based on media reports about it, "Mr. Glover's allegations are without merit, and we will vigorously defend against them," spokesman Mike Bass said. The lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan state court, seeks unspecified damages.

A former New York Police Department lieutenant commander, Glover started working for the league in 2001, his lawsuit said. His job eventually included running security for the NBA Jam Session, a fan-friendly event tied to the All-Star Game.

Glover earned praise during his first few years with the league, but he was passed over for a promotion and started getting bad evaluations after he reported three women's allegations to bosses, according to his complaint.

Two women said another security employee had made offensive remarks, displayed pornographic material on his computer screen and otherwise harassed them, Glover says.

To him, "this was a serious matter," he said in an interview Thursday. But when he relayed the complaints to higher-ups, they expressed concerns about harming the other employee's career, his lawsuit says.

The third woman, Annette Smith, ultimately filed a federal gender-discrimination lawsuit saying Bernard Tolbert, then a league senior vice president for security, made demeaning comments about women and forced her to photocopy a sexually inappropriate picture. Smith, an administrative worker, said she was denied promotions and ultimately fired after she complained.

Tolbert and the league denied her allegations. Her lawsuit was settled in September 2009, court records show.

Glover testified in a deposition that Tolbert and other league officials were aware of Smith's complaints, his lawsuit says.

Glover's lawsuit also names Tolbert and current league security officials Gregory Robinson and James Cawley as defendants.

Tolbert, who now lives in Buffalo, said he was unaware of the lawsuit and didn't realize that Glover was no longer with the NBA, as Glover was still working there when he retired.

"I have no idea what he's talking about," Tolbert said by phone.

Glover, 50, said he repeatedly contested his bad evaluations, to no avail. He said the league cited poor performance in dismissing him in July, but he believes his firing was payback for raising gender-discrimination issues.

"There was a culture of misogyny at this department," said one of his lawyers, Randolph M. McLaughlin.

Sexual harassment on the administrative end of pro basketball became a flashpoint in 2007, when a jury awarded former New York Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders $11.6 million in her lawsuit against then-coach Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden. Thomas, a former Detroit Pistons star, was removed as Knicks coach after a dismal season that year. He now coaches at Florida International University.
___
Copyright 2011 The Associated Press.

Former HHS Director of the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization Named In Discrimination Suit

Debbie Ridgely, the former Director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) has been named in a discrimination suit. The lawsuit, Holmes-Martin, v. Sebelius, Civil Action No. 07-2128, is set for trial December 5, 2011.

Ridgely, the named responsible management official in the pending lawsuit, retired October 1, 2011. The former HHS OSDBU director announced her retirement plan in the Department's newsletter -- "HHS Pulse."
http://www.hhs.gov/about/smallbusiness/pulsehome/pulse_v7_i26.pdf

Civil rights groups are disturbed to hear of the discrimination claim brought against Ridgely. While employed with HHS, Ridgely was responsible for ensuring that small businesses were treated fairly and had an opportunity to compete and be selected for a fair amount of the agency's contracting and subcontracting dollars.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04451.pdf

The plaintiff in the case is Ms. Arthuretta Holmes-Martin, an African American female who had served as the HHS OSDBU Deputy Director before she was terminated from the Department. Ms. Holmes-Martin asserts that HHS discriminated against her on the basis of her race and retaliated against her for her involvement in protected EEO activity by transferring her deputy director duties to Clarence Randall (Caucasian male), awarding Randall the title of "Special Advisor," reassigning many of her projects, and terminating her employment. According to court records, one witness stated that the former HHS OSDBU Director (Ridgely) "caused minority employees to retire or [leave] early because she would not allow them to succeed in their jobs."   

 

In a Memorandum Opinion dated March 17, 2010, U.S. District Judge Richard Urbina found that the plaintiff offered some evidence that Ridgely held discriminatory views. Judge Urbina further stated that "a reasonable jury could infer that Ridgely transferred the plaintiff's Deputy Director duties to Randall [Caucasian] out of a discriminatory motive." (p. 17) http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2007cv02128/128537/36

Mr. Philip Taylor, President of the Coalition for Change, Inc. (C4C) http://coalition4change.org/aboutus.htm wrote to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius about the Department's handling of Ms. Holmes-Martin's case. In the letter to the Obama-appointed Secretary dated November 15, 2011, Mr. Taylor states, "Our members were hopeful that the new administration's cabinet secretaries would be more pro-active in resolving these complaints and law suits that had been unnecessarily prolonged for years by agency and U.S. Justice Department attorneys. We are troubled that the Holmes-Martin case has been ongoing for more than five years." Taylor says the C4C considers discrimination and reprisal for protected activities to be forms of workplace bullying.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72516856/C4C-Letter-to-HHS-Secretary-Re-Holmes-Martin-vs-Sebelius

Ms. Terri L. Williams, Presiding Chair for the Alliance of Federal Workplace Accountability (The Alliance), also wrote to Secretary Sebelius. In the letter dated November 16, 2011, Ms. Williams wrote: "The business community, particularly those in the small, disadvantaged and women-owned businesses, is disappointed to hear of HHS's inability to promptly resolve discrimination claims. It reportedly took over two (2) years for HHS to investigate the former OSDBU Deputy Director's claims of racism, retaliation, and a hostile work environment which is a clear violation of the regulations." http://www.scribd.com/doc/73091321/The-Alliance-for-Federal-Workplace-Accountability-Letter-to-Secretary-Sebelius

The Alliance, which includes such groups as Black Leadership Round Table, Blacks In Government (Region XI), Civil Rights Defense Fund, National Whistleblowers Center, Network for Women's Equality, NO FEAR Coalition, The Coalition For Change, Inc. (C4C), and The USDA Coalition of Minority Employees, pledged that they will stand with Ms. Holmes-Martin when she takes her case to the U. S. District Court of the District of Columbia on December 5.
Ms. Holmes-Martin is represented by Attorney David H. Shapiro, and Richard L. Swick, of Swick & Shapiro, P.C., and Washington, DC. http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?xmldoc=2008753569qfsupp2d184_1737.xml&docbase=CSLWAR3-2007-CURR