A jury previously awarded Shannon Phillips $25.6 million.
Great. Racism is bad and we should stamp it out wherever we find it. I find the punditry around this one troubling. As though white people can’t experience racism.
As though white people can’t experience racism.
Plenty of progressives believe precisely that, sadly.
White people can’t experience systemic racism in the US. A whole load of people can’t articulate the difference between systemic racism and plain ol race based bigotry racism.
Anecdotally, but I (a white dude) have been told that my race would eliminate me for job consideration in the past.
I’m not equating the systemic racism against whites to that suffered by other minorities, but to claim it simply doesn’t exist is wrong. I’ve experienced it.
Edit: I should clarify that I am Canadian, but the culture is similar enough for my point to stand.
Absolutely anyone can experience systemic racism in the US or anywhere else, white people are just less likely to than others.
Here are some examples of systemic racism against white people.
I try to make sure to verbalize the difference in these conversations and label them separately as systemic, such as government and other systems dictated by the majority race. White people can’t experience that kind of racism most of the time, because they are usually the majority party in those systems.
And then interpersonal racism. The racism anyone of any race, creed, or color can experience and put out on others. You could be the last of your kind and still be a horribly racist motherfucker when it came to your interpersonal relationships. And you could hate and be racist against any race whether they are the majority or not.
I think the problem stems from there being two beliefs (that I know of so far) where people believe in systemic racism and some believe in social racism. My fiance believes in systemic racism where you can’t be racist to someone who is white because their race is in power of the government, we bud heads all the time because that doesn’t make any sense to me
What? No we don’t, Jesus conservatives are such dumbasses that believe anything they want to hear
Not a conservative, and I’ve heard people in person argue that racism requires you to hold power, ergo you can’t be racist against white people, since they’ve got all the power.
Is it everyone on the left that believes it, obviously not. But there is a very loud segment that does.
Phillips, 52, claimed in her lawsuit that “her race was a determinative factor” in Starbucks’ decision to fire her in the wake of a 2018 racial firestorm.
In April 2018, two Black men – Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson – were arrested while waiting for a business meeting after an employee called 911 and accused the men of trespassing after they refused to make a purchase or leave the store. The arrests sparked nationwide protests and prompted Starbucks to close some of its stores for a day for racial bias training.
Less than a month after the arrests, Phillips was notified of her termination, despite claiming that she wasn’t at the store that day and was not involved in the arrests in any way.
I don’t know if it was because of her race, but if she really wasn’t at the store that way, it does sound like retaliation.
It pretty obviously was, which is why the case was so obviously a slam dunk. Basically, she stood up for the employee who called the police (essentially Starbucks’ policy at the time when people wouldn’t leave the establishment after being asked first), and got fired in turn as Starbucks was trying to clean house on the whole thing and not get called racist. She definitely had a case.
Comment deleted
(Had to do the edit because the delete function wouldn’t work)
Race or not, how does a wrongful termination cause $28.3mio in damages?
I very much doubt that this employee ever would have earned that money at Starbucks, had she not been wrongfully terminated.
At the same time, the two men who were arrested for existing and for being black received a whopping $1 each.
A lot of the time these things include fines to teach them a lesson. Otherwise corporations would do this way more.
Ok, but why does the person who got fired get the difference?
At least over here, if you have something like this, the person who got fired would get adequate damages rewarded (roughly the amount of money they lost due to being fired wrongfully) while the state would sue the company for a punitory fine.
A lot of the time these things include fines to teach them a lesson. Otherwise corporations would do this way more.
Which is a useless tactic for cops since it’s taxpayers who pay anyhow. Still think settlements should be higher though. When half your city budget becomes paying for police settlements maybe then police reform will have a wider appeal.
What does fining corpos have to do with cops? These are 2 separate discussions.
Disclaimer that I have not followed this case and I’m not a lawyer.
In the US civil cases can have both compensatory and punitive damages. Compensatory is meant to “right the wrong” where you get reimbursed for financial losses, lost time, things you had to pay for as a result of the incident, etc. Punitive is meant to punish the offender if the case finds they acted with some negligence, and ultimately get them and others to change their behavior.
Take the infamous McDonald’s coffee case. The woman who was injured originally only asked for McDonald’s to pay for her medical treatment. She required skin grafts. The jury found that McDonald’s knowing let this circumstance exist where someone was going to get a serious injury and added on punitive damages. Which the judge cut back.
An important caveat is that she was not the first person seriously injured by the temperatures they were keeping the coffee at.
McD decided the money they were saving on free coffee refills was more important than injuring their customers, which is why the punitive damages were awarded.
The lady who got the money was just the one a judge actually paid attention to.
Somewhat paid attention. The jury awarded two days of coffee revenue. The judge cut it to 3x the compensatory damages, about a half day of coffee revenue. I don’t recall if there was a law on the books about that. Some states have “tort reform” laws that limit punitive damages.
As an European, it’s kinda strange to me that the punitory damages are awarded to the person in question, for two reasons.
- Punitory damages aren’t meant to protect that one person (it’s highly unlikely that Starbucks is going to wrongfully fire the same woman a second time) but instead they are meant to protect society
- Punitory lawsuits should not depend on the legal budget of one individual
The way it works over here is like this:
There would be two lawsuits:
- The regular civil lawsuit between the wronged person and the company. The result will be compensatory measures awarded to the wronged person.
- The chamber of labour will run a separate lawsuit regarding law violations/structural issues of the company. The result will be a change in the company and punitory measures. If these include fees, they are awarded to the government.
Well that sounds like socialism! /s
I happen to be one of those Americans that think despite their many flaws, the authors of the Constitution had some fundamentally good ideas. And we used the Constitution as intended to expand individual rights after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. Shamefully we never got around to the Equal Rights Amendment to include women.
What most Americans don’t realize is that the vast majority of what we consider foundational principles are not actually in the Constitution but are instead case law, and how recent much of that is. It wasn’t until 15 years after the Civil War that there was a Supreme Court case which established the idea that corporations are persons under the law and deserving of many of the rights granted under the Constitution using (or mis-using in my opinion) that same 14th Amendment.
Why does that matter? Because it gave corporations an “equal” seat at the table when it comes to disputes. The problem, as you point out, is that our civil dispute resolution system DOES depend on the resources of the “person” and corporations will ALWAYS have more resources. Lots and lots of cases have given corporations more rights and the result is the corportacracy we have now. In other words we went fundamentally the wrong direction diluting the power of the individual. And because corporations have such disproportionate influence on the laws and administrative procedures, we diluted the power of government to represent the people. This has been going on for ~120 years but it kicked into high gear in the 80s (Reagan era).
I’m glad that you guys are still somewhat rational about this, but unfortunately the anti-democratic trend in the US is replicating in the rest of the world. I worry that future histories will compare the rise of this garbage in the US to the start of fascism in Italy in the 1930s.
Sorry, went off on a tangent deep in the comments, but I spend too much time thinking and worrying.
Getting arrested, even wrongfully, is going to fuck a lot of peoples’ lives up as much or more than getting fired. I have a special needs child, and although I’m not a single parent, cops pick me up and put me in jail wrongfully for a day or two, the details of my circumstances are such that’s going to cause substantial trauma for both my child and my wife. In my case my job would be safe, but for a great many people it would not.
I’d take being fired over being arrested all day every day and twice on Sunday.
I don’t mean to suggest she didn’t have a case, only to suggest that payouts for wrongful police action need to be much higher. Aside from the arrest itself, wrongful arrests often include damages to the victim’s body or property, possibly their dog getting shot, etc etc.
I don’t mean to suggest she didn’t have a case, only to suggest that payouts for wrongful police action need to be much higher. Aside from the arrest itself, wrongful arrests often include damages to the victim’s body or property, possibly their dog getting shot, etc etc.
Not even talking about the fact, that these guys now have newspaper articles with both of them in handcuffs, clearly showing their face and names that will come up every time a potential new employer googles their names.
Totally agree with you, wrongful arrest is much more problematic than being wrongfully fired.
Huh… So companies can’t be racist against white people?!?
I hope this brings about a whole ton of new lawsuits as workers finally say enough is enough with token hires which push out white employees only to fill a position with a minority just to fill some arbitrary and rather bullshit diversity target.
I hope this brings about a whole ton of new lawsuits as workers finally say enough is enough with token hires which push out white employees only to fill a position with a minority just to fill some arbitrary and rather bullshit diversity target.
Middle aged white guy here. I’ve been in my field about 30 years. I’ve had a lot of different jobs in that field. I’ve worked with a lot of people who weren’t white. Somehow, in all that time, I’ve never run across one of these “token hires” who were only there because of their skin color.
I’ve met a lot of bigoted, racist white folks though. When you look like the stereotypical maga, folks are pretty free to share their ugliest opinions with you. Most of them have no idea (and will never try to deepen their understanding) about why the benefits of diversity are more than just not having exclusively white faces around.
Ditto here: I’ve actually seen “token” hires on gender (and only in one place), never on race.
Furthermore, that one place which had gender quotas and which at least in the departmemt I was working with clearly had hired some people for their gender, not their competence, had massive corporate culture and even profitability problems (think bankrupt bank with strong political connections that got unconditionally rescued with taxpayer money after the 2008 Crash and just kept losing billions and getting even more disfunctional).
It makes zero business sense to care about anything but competence when hiring somebody, and I say this as somebody who has actually been part of hiring decisions in a few places.
Old lady here - I was the first woman in my role in a couple of jobs back in the 80s and was accused of being a token plenty of times. Had to slog my way uphill through a mountain of sexist shit every single day while seeing men cruise along because they played golf with someone high up.
There were two women that were rumored to have been hired/promoted into a VP position and a Director position only for their gender about 6 years ago. I didn’t work with either of them closely. They both left the company a year later. I’m not sure whether that was vindication of the rumors, or just a turn of circumstance, but worst case their gender bought them only a temporary position.
Just to be clear - plenty more women in both leadership and technical positions, and have been for years. Just those two were the only ones where I ever got a hint of that sort of thing.
