Friday, January 4, 2008
Hawaii-based discrimination case settled for $2.5M
Pacific Business News (Honolulu) – by Linda Chiem Pacific Business News
The nation’s largest defense contractor settled a racial harassment lawsuit in Hawaii for $2.5 million, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced earlier this week.
The EEOC said the settlement is the largest amount ever negotiated for a single person in a racial discrimination case.
The two-year-old case, which was set to go to trial in federal court in Honolulu next month, pitted the EEOC against Lockheed Martin, a Bethesda, Md.-based military contractor that logged $40 billion in sales in 2006.
The commission sued the contractor on behalf of Charles Daniels, an African-American and former Lockheed Martin employee, who complained that his co-workers and supervisor racially harassed him and the company did nothing to stop it.
But in a statement, Lockheed Martin said the government’s characterization of the case was “false” and said the company settled “to enable all parties to move on.” The company said it has “strong policies” against harassment and discrimination and that it took “appropriate remedial action” when it became aware of the allegations in the Daniels case.
Daniels was an avionics electrician at the air station at Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe and claimed he was subjected to “persistent verbal abuse,” including racial taunts and references to lynching, slavery and the Ku Klux Klan by his fellow crew workers and immediate supervisor while working job sites in Hawaii, Florida and Washington state, the EEOC said.
Under the settlement, Lockheed Martin fired the harassers and made significant policy changes to address future discrimination, the EEOC said.
Lockheed Martin insists it fully investigated Daniels’ allegations and took appropriate action as soon as managers found out about it, according to Joe Stout, spokesman for Lockheed Martin.
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