About three and a half years ago, one of my coworkers, Lea, discovered evidence of illegal hiring practices and discrimination. Favoritism and inappropriate behavior between bosses and their employees. She tried to bring it to the attention of her immediate supervisor but while her initial reception was good, eventually her boss closed ranks with the other managers who were involved, leaving my friend out in the cold and in fear of retaliation.
Lea was volunteering on the side to assist teenage girls who were in juvenile detention, trying to give them useful and fun activities. The county, which was both her employer and the provider of juvenile detention, publicly praised Lea as a positive example of a public employee involved with the community, putting in more than her share of time and effort towards those who most needed help. Upper management encouraged Lea to work on what she called the Hope Dolls project during work hours, provided her other work was also done.
But the feared retaliation came. It came, at first, in small ways — managers cutting her off in mid-sentence, rolling their eyes when she spoke, speaking against her to other employees. As the whisper campaign against Lea spread to the higher managers, they cut back on the time she was allowed to work on Hope Dolls. Then they cut her off completely.
Lea saw the writing on the wall. Being a public employee, she knew that, in theory, she had the protections provided by her union, AFSCME Local 88. She turned to me.
Lea and I had had a rocky relationship. I had only been employed at the county, doing computer repair and support, for close to two years. My first year was considered probationary, which was the normal practice. During that time, I could have been let go for any reason at all. I was evaluated twice in that time, and received high marks for my technical skill. But there was always a divide between me and my immediate supervisor. And Lea and I didn’t often get along. I’ll be honest; I was a typically obnoxious geek, and my other coworkers, including Lea, had less confidence when it came to computers and resented my elitist attitude and were angered by my outspokenness. I made small efforts to get along with the rest of the team, but arrogantly assumed that my technical competence and positive reviews would get me through my probation.
Not so. With just over a month to go before I was past probation, my boss called me into her office. I had had these kinds of meetings before with her, over mistakes of communication, justifying my technical decisions and social faux pas, and this meeting started out no different. But when my boss told me that I had somehow been creating a “hostile work environment” for others, my blood ran cold. This was my first public sector job; I knew that political correctness could be deadly; and I also knew that I had no protection from being let go.
Ironically, one of the complaining employees was Lea. But despite my request to discuss the issues, with a neutral party present, my boss seemed disinclined to allow that. But she also seemed strangely reluctant to simply terminate me. Several other employees spoke to my boss, and eventually her boss, in an attempt to stand up for me — they respected my competence, and saw in my bluster the sense of humor hiding underneath. But the issue had somehow drifted from my relationship with my peers and become about me and my boss. Truthfully, it had always been that — the other was an excuse.
Lea told me later that my boss had been trying to get support that would allow her to fire me. She approached Lea and solicited complaints against me. Eventually, with the support of the rest of the team, my boss and I put those differences behind us. My boss was overruled by her boss, something that happened a lot, actually. And, after Lea and I finally got our chance to work things out, we came to respect each other.
Which is when she turned to me for help. After I made it past probation, I decided that I needed to become more involved in the union, which had been helpless to assist me previously.
In the summer of 2001 another blatant incident of favoritism finally stirred myself and several other employees to stand up to management. Their response was a hastily-constructed excuse and no admission of guilt — but despite the sense of being a futile effort, still felt like a huge victory. I think we surprised management for actually challenging them and holding them accountable.
I became a shop steward, which for those of you out there not in a union job, is like a spokesperson for staff, someone who fields complaints and works with staff and management to resolve differences. And Lea needed help.
Unfortunately, I was both a brand-new steward, unsure of what I could and couldn’t do, and a cynic. The union reps we had seemed unwilling or unable to help. They had already pegged Lea as a chronic complainer and saw this as more of the same. I’ll never know for sure if the rep’s response was motivated by apathy or corruption — regardless, I knew two things: first, that if Lea didn’t try to seek the union’s help, it could hinder her later, and second, that she shouldn’t put much hope into seeing her problems significantly addressed by that route. It seemed like a delaying tactic to her, but Lea wasn’t completely deterred.
The events of September 11, 2001, shocked everyone. And it seemed to inspire Lea to push her complaint harder. With the threat of death and attack from previously-unsuspected enemies hanging over the nation’s collective heads, and with the continued marginalization and harassment at the hands of her supervisors, what did she have to lose?
Simultaneously with working with the union through me, she also sought help from the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) and filed a complaint with them. She filed the complaint in October 2001, and accused county management of discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, disparate treatment (forbidding Lea to use her county equipment for the Hope Dolls project, while managers were making massive use of their computers for personal work), and harassment and creating a hostile work environment for her.
Two weeks after the county received the complaint, Lea came to work to find that she was being put on paid administrative leave, pending an investigation. Into what? She was told it was for using county equipment for personal business and creating a hostile work environment for her coworkers. A mirror image of her complaint about management.
Being her steward, I set about doing what I could. I collected copies of Lea’s employee file and was surprised when I wasn’t challenged for my request by HR. I chalked that up at the time to the difference between my training and reality but now I’m not so sure. My bosses’ boss, a middle man manager, called me into his office for a meeting about Lea’s case. It turned surreal very quickly, as he made insinuations about how I have a responsibility to follow the letter of the contract, and how his dealings with the union have been untroubled in the past. I was reminded at the time of that scene in any classic noir film where the investigator is warned about digging too far into the truth and it is hinted that bad things might happen. That conversation was exciting and terrifying. Not to mention vindicating.
After an investigation, including a folksy interview by a management stooge, Lea was terminated from county employment. I filed grievances for her termination, which were promptly denied by management. We appealed the issue to the Local 88 Executive Board — since the next step was to call in an arbitrator, which cost money, we had to have the approval of the Board to continue. The Board voted not to pursue the issue. Which is about what I expected, and I told Lea that she should go to town with a lawyer, now that the final t had been crossed and the final i dotted with the union.
The termination was outrageous. She had filed a complaint, and county management had pretended the complaint was never filed, and punished her for trying to raise the issue! Did they really think they could get away with it? Unfortunately, to myself, who has no faith in justice being served, especially when justice is sought from those who mete out justice to the citizenry, the odds were great that they could. Still, I and several others could not stand by and watch Lea fight this battle alone.
That was still two and a half years ago, and Lea started focussing on her Hope Dolls project, turning it into a non-profit organization and working it up into a successful enterprise — while simultaneously pursuing a remedy for her unlawful termination. She enlisted the help of a lawyer, inundated him with documents and emails and notes collected during her employment, and built a case.
The county lawyers delayed and tried to settle the case out of court, they tried to make Lea go away, but Lea couldn’t be bought. She wanted, more than anything else, to have her day in court and to have these events made part of the public record. She wanted to face those who wronged her and show them that she would push with everything available to her, to try to balance out what they had taken from her.
She had not only lost a job and salary, she had lost the benefits and insurance that came with that; and at her age, with her medical history, and that of her husband who was also dependent on her benefits for medical care, it would be nearly impossible for her to get coverage as good as the county provided. Hope Dolls was fulfilling, but not financially lucrative. And, of course, she had lost some hope herself, being bullied and intimidated. If she let the record stand, she might be seen as an abuser of the public trust, when she knew it was the other way around.
I kept in contact with Lea to find out how the case was progressing. The speed (or lack) was frustrating but Lea never gave up. And, bless her heart, she partially wanted to get some small satisfaction for those of us still employed in that sick system. She heard our stories and realized that things had not significantly changed since she had been forced out. The abuses of power only continued. And we were becoming tired of challenging them. We needed a big victory to get their attention.
After nearly two years of legal maneuvering, Lea’s case finally reached the point where a trial date was set. Both Multnomah County and Jann Brown were named defendants in the complaint. I and several other employees were named as witnesses — for the plaintiff. The county lawyers fought to prevent it’s employees from being interviewed by Lea’s lawyer — when he was the one issuing the subpoena!
When they lost that battle, they fought for, and won, the right to officially inform us of the subpoena, and the right to interview us, also. A witness for the plaintiff has no legal obligation to speak to the lawyers for the defendant — but the county legal department presented this situation to the witnesses as if it were a done deal. They used (abused?) their power as employers to attempt to dig up information that would help them in their case. I initially refused to speak to them, and finally gave in to political pressures after they contacted the CIO about the matter and had a manager order me to attend. I met, but was less than forthcoming. I wanted Lea to win.
The actual court time passed quickly. I was nervous about testifying and worried that I might not provide enough information. George, Lea’s lawyer, had several points about my part of the story that he wanted the jury to hear, but in the rush to trial had very little time to properly brief all of his witnesses. And, surprisingly for him, he had a lot of witnesses ready to speak up for Lea. Typically in these cases, it seems, fear wins out and few people have the courage to step up on the stand and go on record in defense of the intimidated and oppressed. George and Lea have praised me and the other witnesses for our courage. However, I honestly believe I could have done no different.
After we had all testified, Lea’s witnesses whispered to each other about our nervousness — did we say enough? Will the jury believe us, or management?
Management had argued that Lea had unlawfully accessed other people’s emails, documents, and calendars and that was why she was terminated. They also argued that it was an entirely different manager who had terminated her, not the ones named in the BOLI complaint, so it couldn’t have possibly been retaliation. And besides, the manager who fired Lea didn’t even know about the BOLI complaint. In fact, nobody knew anything about what any of the other managers were doing, were involved in, or how each other felt about Lea at all. And even if Lea demonstrated that other employees (including managers) were using county equipment for personal use, Lea still did it, and since that was against county policy, she deserved to be fired.
However, under Oregon state “whistleblower” laws, if an employee of a public agency has a suspicion of wrong doing that is against the public interest, they are protected from any repercussions in accessing public documents. And, as we employees are told all the time, any document we write as public employees is considered a public document.
This past Friday, after all the witnesses had testified, after the closing statements were made, and the jury had retired to deliberate, George warned Lea that if the jury came back quickly, it was almost always a defeat.
The jury took less than half a day to reach a verdict. George told me that he primed Lea for the worst, ready to comfort her, tell her she’d fought a good fight, and advise her to move on from here with Hope Dolls and put it all behind her.
The verdict was that Multnomah County and Jann Brown were both guilty.
Guilty
You have no idea how satisfying that is to know that all these years we were right.