News
On September 16, 2014, Litigation Principal David Morrison won a summary judgment for Abbott Laboratories in a discrimination case before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
In Ho v Abbott Laboratories the Court ruled that Abbott did not discriminate against an employee when it fired her after she twice failed tests on required training, even though the training was not part of her core job duties. Other employees in the same job also had to take the same training, and the employee failed to show any similarly situated employees outside her protected classes were treated more favorably. The Court granted summary judgment on her retaliation claim as well.
The employee, an Asian American woman, began working for the lab in 1996. In late 2005, at the age of 51, she was promoted to the position of quality engineer in the quality assurance department. She met expectations under her first supervisor; however, in 2007 and under a new supervisor, she began having performance issues. The supervisor put her on a coaching and counseling plan, which included batch record review training.
After she failed a batch record review test, she was put on a performance improvement plan that required her to retake the batch record test and pass it with a score of 100 percent. She received batch record training, during which her trainer showed her screenshots of her mistakes. He gave them to her to make copies, and she later refused to return them. The employee took the batch record test again, and failed. A senior specialist in employee relations reviewed the circumstances regarding the failures and the screenshot incident, and decided to terminate the employee. The supervisor informed the employee in August 2008 that she was fired.
Cat’s Paw
In an employment discrimination case, the central issue is typically the motivation of the person who made the adverse employment decision. However, the Court noted that in this case the employee asserted a “cat’s paw” theory, in which she alleged that her biased supervisor exerted influence over the employee relations specialist decision-maker to terminate her employment.
Under this theory, the employee must demonstrate that the supervisor performed an act motivated by discriminatory animus that was intended to cause an adverse employment action, and that such act was the proximate cause of the ultimate action. Thus, in this case, noted the Court, if discriminatory animus by the employee’s supervisor was the proximate cause of the decision to terminate her, then the lab may be liable under Title VII and the ADEA.
Real Reason for Employee’s Termination?
The employee relations specialist based her decision to fire the employee on two grounds: (1) the employee’s failure to pass the batch record reviews tests and (2) her refusal to return the screenshots. The employee disputed those reasons, claiming that she should not have been required to take the batch record review tests, and that she did not actually fail the second test.
Because the supervisor gave the employee-relations specialist the information that she used to make her decision to fire the employee, the Court found that it was possible for the employee to show that a discriminatory batch record review process was the proximate cause of the decision to fire her. It held, however, that she failed to present enough evidence for a reasonable jury to find that the creation, administration and application of the test to her were the product of discrimination.
The employee argued that the test was not in the description of her “core” job duties, but the Court found that she failed to show that the supervisor’s decision to give her batch record review training was based on age or race discrimination, where two others in her position, who were also required to participate in the training, were white men in their 30s. Further, her claim that she had not failed the second test, but the answer key to the second was switched to make it look as though she had, did not stand up to scrutiny.
No Prima Facie Case
The Court held that the employee could not establish a prima facie case of discrimination. She failed to show that she was meeting the lab’s legitimate job expectations because she did not meet the goal of batch record review training set out for her by her supervisor. She failed to show that any similarly situated individual outside of her protected class was treated more favorably; she did not identify any other employee that failed the second batch record review test or refused to return documents to a trainer.
No Lie
Even if she had established a prima facie case, she did not show that the lab’s legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for terminating her employment were pretextual. The Court stated that to establish pretext, she must show that the personnel employee’s reason for firing her “was a lie.” The employee offered no such evidence.
Stray Remark Was Not Proximate Cause of Termination
The employee offered direct evidence of discrimination, but the Court found this evidence insufficient, as well. There was a single handwritten note by her supervisor that said that another employee at the lab believed that the employee might be joining an “Asian class action.” The Court held that this statement did not give rise to an inference of discriminatory intent for two reasons.
First, the employee did not allege that this remark proximately caused her termination, she offered no evidence that the decision-maker even heard of or knew of this comment when making the decision to terminate the employee.
Second, this was an isolated stray remark, and insufficient to establish that the decision was motivated by discrimination. The employee offered no evidence of suspicious timing, ambiguous statements or behavior toward other employees in the protected group, or evidence that similarly situated employees outside the protected group were treated more favorably.
Applying for Transfer Was Not Protected Activity
The employee complained that the employer retaliated against her after she applied for a transfer to a position in a lab in California. The Court noted that attempting to transfer within a company is not protected activity under Title VII or the ADEA.
