San Francisco Chronicle
John Burton faces sexual harassment suit
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Former state Senate leader John Burton was sued Wednesday for $10 million by the executive director of his San Francisco charitable foundation, who claims he sexually harassed her by swearing at her and making lewd and suggestive comments on an almost daily basis.
Burton's attorney called the lawsuit, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, a "shakedown" and predicted that Burton's "character and reputation will win out at the end of the day."
During a 35-year legislative career in which he rose to become California's second-most-powerful politician, Burton became well known for his mouth. A 2004 Chronicle article about the ex-bartender described him as "visceral, irascible, occasionally avuncular and routinely profane."
Kathleen Driscoll, a 48-year-old San Francisco resident now on stress-related medical leave from the John Burton Foundation, said in her lawsuit that Burton used more than salty language.
Driscoll said the former Democratic lawmaker repeatedly remarked on her choice of underwear and the appearance of her breasts, often mimicked masturbation in her presence and told her on roughly 20 occasions, "I had a dream about you last night," while raising his eyebrows in a suggestive manner.
At a news conference Wednesday, Driscoll's attorney played a recorded voice message in which a man she identified as Burton told Driscoll, "When you drop stuff off, I mean, stop in, will you? I'm not getting laid under the f- table."
Driscoll said she had filed suit after unsuccessfully complaining about Burton's behavior to the 75-year-old former lawmaker himself and to the foundation's personnel department.
"My whole life has been turned around, and I did nothing wrong," Driscoll said. "He bullied me and sexually harassed me. It's scary because he's powerful, and he told me that every day."
Burton's attorney, Susan Rubenstein, said that the allegations were false and that Burton, who left the state Legislature in 2005 because of term limits, had never before been accused of sexual harassment.
"This is a man who spent nearly a half century of his life in public service," Rubenstein said. "If he was a sexual harasser or a sexual predator, I think the press would have discovered that by now."
Several friends and former colleagues of Burton jumped to his defense, including state Democratic Party chairman Art Torres, who called Burton a champion of women's rights.
"Anybody who used that colorful language for 45 years - I just can't imagine anyone would take him seriously," Torres said. "That's what he's like. He's old-school, and he means nothing by it."
Driscoll's attorney, Kelly Armstrong, said, "In terms of him saying, 'Your nipples are erect,' that goes way beyond salty, good-old-boy language."
Driscoll said she had previously worked as a donor relations officer at the San Francisco Foundation and as a director of development at UCSF. She said she has 12 years of experience with charities.
According to her complaint, Burton hired her as executive director in August 2006 and began to harass her the next month. Armstrong said the alleged abuse escalated and was not a "quid pro quo situation" in which demotion or promotion were at stake, but "more of a hostile work environment."
Among other complaints, Driscoll said Burton took her to a movie after asking her to meet him to work on the weekend; told her she was "probably wild sexually like all Catholic girls"; and introduced Driscoll to business associates as a "thong model."
Burton founded the John Burton Foundation for Children Without Homes in 2004 and is now its chairman. The charity is "dedicated to improving the quality of life for California's homeless children and developing policy solutions to prevent homelessness," according to its Web site.
Burton was elected to the state Assembly in 1964 and to the U.S. House of Representatives a decade later. In 1982, he left Congress because of a cocaine addiction that he later overcame.
He returned to the Assembly in 1988 and was elected to the state Senate in 1996. Two years later, he was unanimously elected as the Senate's president pro tem.
E-mail Demian Bulwa at dbulwa@sfchronicle.com.
(This article appeared on page B - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle)
The New York Times
Worker: 'Toyota Way' Ignored at Factory
The Associated Press
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
TOKYO (AP) -- The California auto worker who is suing Toyota and others in a whistleblower lawsuit said Tuesday she was merely carrying out the quality-conscious "Toyota way" in spotting defects when managers cracked down on her efforts and demoted her.
Katy Cameron, 54, employed for 23 years at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Corp. in Fremont, Calif., is suing the companies in a lawsuit, filed Nov. 6 in Alameda County Superior Court.
The lawsuit accuses management at NUMMI of routinely deleting or downgrading defects that Cameron found as a certified auditor -- including broken seat belts, faulty headlights, inadequate braking and steering wheel alignment problems -- and demands $45 million in damages for retaliation against a whistleblower and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
"I believed in the Toyota way. I really did. I just wanted to know why they turned their head on me," Cameron said from California in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "Why did they look the other way when I cried out for help?"
Cameron said she was trained in Toyota's corporate philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of the workers on the assembly line not only in making manufacturing more efficient but also pointing out defects and other problems. She was so good she trained other auditors, she says.
But about five years ago, the management at NUMMI seemed to shift its emphasis to quantity over quality, eager to reduce defect numbers, which determined their bonus pay, said Cameron.
And Toyota's vaunted quality-check system seemed to get neglected, she said.
Cameron said she went to court only after she tried to alert higher-ups to what she saw as serious wrongdoing, including her bosses, as well as the top executive at NUMMI, handing him a letter and other reports in writing in 2006.
She also sent reports in writing to Toyota executives, including one to President Katsuaki Watanabe but has received no response so far, she said.
The companies are declining comment on the lawsuit, saying the case is pending. But NUMMI spokesman Lance Tomasu said in a statement last week that quality is a priority and said the claims will be investigated thoroughly.
Toyota Executive Vice President Kazuo Okamoto, who oversees technology, acknowledged he was aware of the lawsuit but said Monday he did not know details.
Toyota has built its global empire riding on its reputation for reliable vehicles. Toyota executives have repeatedly said they are worried about quality standards slipping as the automaker steps up worldwide expansion.
Toyota's products, such as the Camry and Corolla, are so popular some analysts say the company is on track to beat GM as the world's biggest automaker by sales this year. But the number of recalls has ballooned with the surge in vehicle sales.
"It was Katy's passion to be the eye of the consumer," said Cameron's attorney Kelly Armstrong in San Francisco. "This is a $45 million message to NUMMI, Toyota and General Motors that they can no longer emphasize quantity over quality at the expense of hardworking Americans and consumers."
Cameron, who has been on medical leave from stress the lawsuit says is caused by persistent on-the-job harassment, returned to work Tuesday. But she has been assigned to putting auto parts in boxes, and is no longer allowed to inspect vehicles. Her bosses have repeatedly threatened to fire her, according to the lawsuit.
Cameron said NUMMI management blocked her attempts to relay quality problems to Toyota in Japan by preventing her from using the company phone and fax and taking away her in-company Internet privileges.
She expressed admiration for the Toyota work ethic, praising the corporate culture as "awesome." There is nothing Cameron wants more than to have her job back checking for defects, she says.
"I was trying to do my job. It was my job. And now here I am: I am punished for doing my job," she said. "I felt really betrayed. And I felt used because I worked hard. I worked very hard."
San Francisco Chronicle
Quality inspector sues GM, Toyota over retaliation in Fremont plant
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
The world's two largest automakers - Toyota and General Motors - were sued in Alameda County Superior Court Tuesday by a quality control inspector who said plant managers retaliated against her when she reported numerous defects on thousands of vehicles produced by the joint Toyota/GM factory in Fremont.
In a so-called whistle-blower lawsuit, Katy Cameron, 54, said she reported to her bosses at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. facility that cars were rolling off the assembly line with "defective seat belts," "water leaks throughout the vehicles," "mirrors falling off," "steering wheel alignment defects" and "missing radiator caps," among other problems.
Cameron's job, which she has been doing since 1991, was to detect "serious defects" in the cars before they were shipped to dealers, but eight years ago, the suit said, the Nummi managers started changing her defect reports "in order to lower the daily Defect Per Vehicle."
Two years ago, Cameron said in the lawsuit filed by San Francisco attorney Kelly Armstrong, "the report alterations became more substantial, and Nummi management routinely deleted or downgraded significant and serious defects" from her reports.
Cameron, who said she has worked at the plant for 23 years, is now on medical leave, she said in an interview, because of the "emotional distress" allegedly caused her by her experiences at the auto plant.
Cameron and Armstrong said it was not known if any of the allegedly defective vehicles caused death or injury to any customers.
Nummi, which also was named in the suit, was created in the early 1980s as a joint venture between GM and Toyota to make small cars. In 2006, a "banner year at Nummi," according to Nummi News, an internal newspaper, the factory produced nearly 429,000 vehicles - Toyota Tacoma pickup trucks, as well as Toyota Corolla and Pontiac Vibe cars.
In response to the lawsuit, spokesman Lance Tomasu said in an e-mailed statement, "Nummi cannot comment on pending claims. However, quality is a high priority. Over the years our team members have worked hard to assure a long tradition of outstanding quality, earning numerous plant and product awards. The success of our vehicles in the marketplace is a strong indication that our customers appreciate the quality of Nummi-built cars and trucks. Nevertheless, we will investigate these claims thoroughly."
On the Nummi Web site ( www.nummi.com), the joint venture explains its manufacturing process this way:
"One of Nummi's basic concepts is that quality should be ensured in the production process itself. This concept, known as jidoka, means not allowing problems to pass from one work station to the next.
"Jidoka can refer to equipment automatically stopping under abnormal conditions, such as when a machine breaks or problems arise. Jidoka is also used when a team member encounters a problem in his or her work station. Team members are responsible for correcting the problem by pulling (on a) cord, which can stop the line."
Cameron said that from 2005 through 2007, she was finding an average of nine to 15 defects per car. Knowing that her managers were altering her reports, she charged, Cameron "began retaining her original reports, which were done in pencil, and turning in photocopies to Nummi management to make it more difficult for them to erase the numerous defects she reported."
She said in the suit that one manager "threatened to fire her when she complained to him" about the defective vehicle reports and that although she "complained repeatedly" to management about the "unlawful altering of audit reports" and the "retaliation and harassment" she was suffering, "they feigned ignorance of the harassment ... and did nothing to investigate her complaints or prevent future harassment."
(This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle)
San Francisco Chronicle
Chris Colin, Special to SF Gate
October 29, 2007
In the beginning, 9/11 was a local story - it was the intimate grief and shock and incomprehension that so profoundly shook us those first days and weeks. Over time it morphed into something political, and we came to see the tragedy through the wide-angle lenses of foreign policy and law and the other spasms of governance it inspired.
But even as the specific event blurred into unspecific politics and symbolism over the years, it continued to affect individuals in concrete ways - ways that Fremont resident Hamid Sayadi claims he paid a price for.
His story is one of the many that have both nothing and everything to do with 9/11. A witty and eloquent Kurdish-American in his 50s, Sayadi waved the flag of his adopted country and cheered its military for three decades - all to end up stripped to his underwear one day, in the boiler room of his workplace, he says, a ragged and sobbing husk of his former self.
The truth of what happened to him, and why, lies shrouded in the fog of endless war, and in the fog of work as well - that odd space where strangers are forced to co-exist for years on end. In that double blindness, even if the parties involved could agree on facts, who could say for sure what was appropriate and what was cruel, even unlawful?
To get to the boiler room, we start in Iraq. Sayadi was an American-by-proxy before he ever set foot in this country. An officer in the Iraqi air force, he fought the Baathist regime from the inside, providing intelligence for the Kurdish revolution - and by extension for the CIA, which was supporting the struggle as part of its broader operations in the region.
It was dangerous work, and eventually rumors of Sayadi's disloyalty began to circulate. Having already seen family members killed in Kirkuk and others tortured - "they peel you like an onion," he told me recently - he fled the military and then Iraq altogether.
In 1977 Sayadi became one of many Kurds given amnesty in the States. Having mined him for information on Iraq's military, he says, the government resettled him in North Dakota ("They thought we were from a cold place and we'd like it. But it was too cold!") where he started a new life as a welder and fabricator.
When the cold finally got to him, Sayadi came to San Francisco in 1978. He was hired as a journeyman mechanic at Greyhound, where he stayed until his job was sent to Mexico in 1990. That summer he was brought on as a mechanic at New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc., or NUMMI, the large automobile manufacturing plant in Fremont where both GM and Toyota cars are made.
"It was very nice, I had no problems," Sayadi says of the beginning. But two months later Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and in January 1991, Congress authorized the use of military force to push him out. Life for Sayadi at NUMMI wasn't the same, he says.
First, a rechristening: co-workers began calling him "Ali Baba," he says. Another simply referred to him as "Kuwaiti." He shaved his mustache so as not to draw comparisons to Hussein. Sprinkled in with the insults were constant requests for tutorials on all things Iraqi - perhaps benign curiosity, perhaps a way of emphasizing his differentness.
"People were very thirsty for information about that area. And who knows about this? Ali Baba knows. They'd listen to the news at night, then come to work the next day and ask what Iraq is about, what Kuwait is, who Saddam is. I tried to enlighten them. I'm a symbol of that area," he says, adding with a laugh, "anyway, I knew my geography. I had every National Geographic that came out since I came to the U.S."
Even as his co-workers were teasing and grilling him, Sayadi was proudly hoisting the American flag every night after work, and says he shook hands with governor Pete Wilson at a massive rally in support of the U.S. military actions.
When the Gulf War ended, things calmed down at NUMMI. Like America itself, Sayadi enjoyed a decade of relative peace at the plant. Then came 9/11, and overnight everything changed.
"Oh, NUMMI hires terrorists now?" was the sort of remark he says he heard commonly. His presence among co-workers invariably brought about mention of jihad or terrorism. One day, he was told by a superior that his lunchbox needed to be searched. When he asked why, he said he was led to believe he was considered a possible suicide bomber.
"I just opened the lunch box. I was dumbfounded. I was so shameful. I didn't know what to say. That was the point when I should have said something to the media - 'Look what happened to me.' But I was so ashamed. I thought, maybe he's right. I'm from (that region), I deserve this."
Not everyone at NUMMI treated him this way, Sayadi is quick to clarify. Some who worked in close proximity knew him well, and took no part in the harassment.
"I could educate the five people around me well - they loved me, and came to my mother's funeral, and knew I'm pro-United States. But that's only five (people)," Sayadi says.
What he first dismissed as ignorance gradually came to wear away at him. He grew depressed over what he describes as a barrage of insults. His son's art was removed from a wall where paintings and drawings from the children of other employees hung, he says. His tires were slashed one day. And, always, the insults.
Sayadi says he complained in writing to management, but that the only response was further humiliation. In one letter he still has, he took issue with a toilet-cleaning assignment he was given - retaliation for complaining, he says, and because someone from a "carpet-flying area" surely couldn't handle anything more complex. He came to internalize the contempt hurled at him.
"I said, why am I from there? I convinced myself I'm guilty. Why do I look so bad? I shouldn't have been from there. I punished myself and went along with them - I deserve this. The humiliation has never gone away," he says.
The irony here is not subtle: When Sayadi wasn't busy being accused of being a terrorist, he was out supporting the U.S. military and its invasion of Iraq. Even as the rest of the country began to lose faith in the war, this man being treated as a dangerous traitor held firm.
The worst had yet to come, he says. It was in spring of 2003 that President Bush had his famous "Mission Accomplished" moment aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and Sayadi reports that NUMMI hosted its own celebration. He estimates that between 500 and 1,000 workers gathered in the plant's cafeteria for a rally over the seeming victory in Iraq - he himself had purchased a special American flag hat just for the occasion. A marching band played, various speakers gave remarks and in general "it was a very intense rally," he recalls. "But I didn't see more than five minutes of it."
Sayadi had just arrived when two security guards approached him. One put a finger on Sayadi's mouth, he remembers, the other held his hands behind his back; together they escorted him from the cafeteria.
"They took me to the boiler room just outside, and left me alone with this one big guy, big like a mountain. Very intimidating, very sadistic-looking with this toothpick in his mouth. I remember that look. It was like he'd eaten my meat and was now cleaning his teeth out."
The man ordered Sayadi to take his coveralls off. As Sayadi tells it, something finally snapped in him. He broke down and wept.
"I was crying like a woman. I was sitting on a chair, sobbing," he says. "They broke me down. I was done. I didn't have any defense besides my crying."
He proceeded to strip down to his underwear; he guesses now that somebody suspected he had a bomb. At some point a co-worker happened to open the door. Sayadi says the man's jaw fell open. Sayadi begged him to bring him his clothing from his locker.
"I was like a person drowning in a river, grabbing at a piece of hay," he says of that moment.
Eventually he was released, but that night he checked himself into his local hospital - something like an emotional breakdown had occurred, he says.
"They took my shoelaces. It was very humiliating, but I was done. I was cooked," he recalls.
San Francisco employment attorney Kelly Armstrong is representing Sayadi in a $40 million lawsuit against his former employer, as well as Toyota and GM, the two companies behind NUMMI.
"It's a $40 million message to NUMMI that they cannot mistreat, humiliate, degrade, harass, discriminate and retaliate against and fail to protect the very people that make NUMMI what it is today," Armstrong says. "It's a message that Mr. Sayadi deserves justice."
She adds that 10 former and current NUMMI employees will provide witness testimony to Sayadi's harassment, including the one who walked in on the boiler room incident. Armstrong says that one co-worker has admitted to telling Sayadi "powder your face white and change your name" and they would get along fine. He also likened the harassment Sayadi received to that of Japanese citizens living in this country during World War II, she says.
One current employee named Bill Merker confirmed in a deposition that he referred to Sayadi as "Ali Baba" on multiple occasions - "it just fit," he said. Merker, now a Team Leader with NUMMI's Facilities group, worked with Sayadi as a Team Member.
"Perhaps there was, you know, he was trying to be a true American, and he was still parading around that he was Iraqi, and proud of it, and it might have bothered some people," Merker said in the deposition.
"I would say people would ignore him, more," he also said, regarding the period after 9/11. "They wouldn't want to get close to him."
NUMMI and its counsel have declined to comment on the case, but according to documents filed to the court, it contends that Sayadi was an unstable and even potentially dangerous employee:
"In the last few months of his employment, he engaged in inappropriate threatening behavior toward other team members," one filing stated. The company did not elaborate further.
In its answer to Sayadi's initial complaint, the defense also stated that the "Plaintiff consented to each of the allegedly wrongful acts Defendants allegedly took against him," and that "at all times relevant, Defendants promulgated an anti-discrimination policy and complaint procedure which was communicated to the Plaintiff, and Defendants otherwise exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly any inappropriate conduct."
NUMMI also asserts that Sayadi had received a written corrective notice regarding his behavior, and that in April 2003, after the "inappropriate threatening conduct" continued, he was taken to a human resources office. He began to cry, the claim states, "and required a doctor to evaluate him. He was placed on a short leave of absence and was required to take a Fitness for Duty exam before returning to work. Plaintiff never returned to work and submitted medical notes stating he was unable to work." It's unclear whether this incident is related to the alleged boiler room incident.
Armstrong argues, in turn, that her client's behavior was just a response to the abuse he claims.
"Because NUMMI repeatedly failed to acknowledge Sayadi's complaints of harassment and the threats against him in the workplace, he reached a psychological breaking point where he reacted against his tormentors," she wrote in an e-mail.
Sayadi says he went on disability leave after the incident in the boiler room.
"I was not the same person you're talking to now. I was a rag. When I started driving again, I had three tickets and one accident in the three or four months afterwards. I no longer wanted to live."
Over the next three years or so, Sayadi says he healed a bit - this is the man who stood up to the Baathists from within Iraq's own air force, after all. When his disability leave came to an end, he tried to go back to NUMMI.
"I was a proud worker, fixing machines, a skilled person. I didn't like the environment, but I loved my job," he says. Instead, in February 2006, Armstrong says he was told there was no more room for him at the plant.
Armstrong says the judge in the case recently urged the parties involved to seek mediation - a move she sees as validation of Sayadi's allegations. Should the matter be settled out of court, the truth of what happened, or didn't happen, to Sayadi might never be known. But he wouldn't be the first to be harassed after 9/11 - a fact Joan Ehrlich, San Francisco's District Director for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, knows all too well.
"We've had over 1,000 complaints (from Arabs, South Asians and Muslims in general) since 9/11," Ehrlich says. "It's an intolerable situation. It's unlawful. Everybody has a right not to be harassed on the job. A strong manager can stop it."
Ehrlich says Sayadi's accusations sound familiar - the cases she sees regular involve similar name-calling and other insults, and just as often defy logic.
"It doesn't make any sense," she says upon hearing about Sayadi's case in particular. "The guy's been there over a decade and suddenly he's a security problem?"
Chris Martinez, law manager at the Law Offices of Mayor Joseph L. Alioto and Angela Alioto, confirmed that his firm had represented "several discrimination cases against NUMMI over the years." All settled out of court, Martinez said.
For his part, the man who first discovered the United States via frigid North Dakota 30 years ago says he still loves his adopted country. Ignorance, Sayadi says, can be cured. But the country needs to find its way back to its original dream, he says, one that's perhaps grown obscure in the turbulent years since 9/11.
"We were a melting pot, we were getting mixed well. Now we're a salad bowl, everyone's sticking out like a sore thumb. I became like a cherry tomato in that bowl," Sayadi says with a sad chuckle.
As for his own personal goals, the cooking metaphors fall away.
"I was somebody, I want to be somebody again," he says. "I'm nobody now."
San Francisco Daily Journal
Donna Domino, Daily Journal Staff Writer
February 16, 2006
Marriott International is the target of two employee lawsuits, one accusing the chain of violating San Francisco minimum-wage law and the other of discriminating against older sales managers seeking promotions ... Marriott is also the subject of a discrimination suit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, an expansion of a case originally filed in 2004 by sales managers in Newport Beach. The three managers are in their 60's and said they were denied promotions by the same executive Rick Owen, the company's Western vice president, in favor of younger applicants. Roger-Vasselin v. Marriott International, CV-04027.
Plaintiff Victoria Roger-Vasselin, of San Francisco, 63, who works as a regional membership executive at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco, said Owen told her when she sought a management position in Arizona in 2000 that "you can't take that position, it takes a lot of energy to run a team of that size. Someone younger would be good for that position - not you." He also advised her that "complacency comes with age," according to the suit.
Another plaintiff, Kenneth Arrick, a former Newport Beach sales executive, was 64 when he says Owen put him on a "do not promote" list and said he was ostracized when he complained.
Richard Kittner, a former Newport Beach sales executive, was 60 when he was told by Owen that older workers should stay settled and not move around too much" when he applied for position in Palm Desert, according to the suit. Owen also told him that older workers "complain more and are difficult to manage," the suit said.
"I think Marriott has a pattern and practice of widespread discrimination of all different kinds of employees as evidenced in the two simultaneous suits." said plaintiff's attorney Kelly Armstrong of San Francisco's Armstrong law firm.
Trial has been set for June.
Orlando Sentinel
Jerry W. Jackson | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted October 7, 2005
Three Marriott time-share salespeople who say they were passed over for promotions and harassed because of their age are battling the company in federal court in San Francisco.
Kelly Armstrong, a lawyer representing the employees -- two of whom no longer work for Marriott -- said Thursday they will seek at least $75 million in damages in the age-discrimination case.
If enough current or former Marriott workers come forward with similar claims, Armstrong said, the suit would be re-filed to seek class-action status.
"This is a call to arms," Armstrong said during a telephone conference about the case, which was filed about a year ago but re-filed with amendments on Thursday. "What Marriott did was wrong, and we want to send a message."
John Wolf, a spokesman for Marriott International, said: "We believe the case has no merit." The company's time-share division, Marriott Vacation Club, is based in Orlando.
The employees -- all older than 60 -- allege in the lawsuit that their efforts to be promoted were rebuffed and they were subjected to age-related jokes or comments by a younger supervisor. "Younger, lesser qualified applicants were repeatedly chosen for promotions," the suit contends, and the supervisor made it clear he preferred, "young, hip, good looking" employees.
"I couldn't sleep at night," said former Marriott employee Richard Kittner, now 61 and living in Orange County, Calif. He said he was forced to leave the company when he filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Armstrong said the two other plaintiffs, Victoria Roger-Vasselin, 63, of San Francisco, and Kenneth Arrick, 65, of Scottsdale, Ariz., also were "retaliated" against when they complained about their treatment.
Armstrong said that, while it is not illegal for a company to promote or show a preference for employees who are considered "hip" or "good looking," those preferences constituted "part of a pattern" of discrimination in this case. She said the supervisor named as a defendant is no longer western regional vice president of Marriott Vacation Club International but holds a similar position with the Ritz Carlton Club in California.
Reuters
Marriott sued for age discrimination
By Deena Beasley
Thursday, October 6, 2005
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Three workers in their 60s on Thursday filed suit against Marriott International Inc. alleging that they were passed over for promotion at the hotel operator's timeshare subsidiaries in favor of "young, hip, good-looking" people.
"These are all long-time sales executives who were repeatedly denied promotions due to their age," said Kelly Armstrong, the attorney representing the plaintiffs.
She described the age discrimination suit filed in federal court in San Francisco as "a call to arms for all older employees at Marriott to join in a possible class action."
The three sales executives worked for Marriott Vacation Club International and Ritz-Carlton Club. The suit also names as a defendant Rick Owen, western regional vice president for Marriott's timeshare operations, based in Newport Beach, California.
Marriott and Owen could not be immediately reached for comment.
One plaintiff, Victoria Roger-Vasselin, still works in San Francisco for the Ritz Carlton timeshare unit.
"I was intimidated, embarrassed, and emotionally distraught," by Owen's treatment and comments, she said.
Another plaintiff, Kenneth Arrick, has been out on psychological disability leave since February.
He said Marriott's human resources department declined to take action after he complained that Owen had passed him over for promotion in favor of younger, less-qualified candidates.
Richard Kittner was fired by Marriott in 2002 after he filed a federal complaint when a promised sales director job in Aspen, Colorado was given to someone else.
"I was told my superiors would not talk to me, and don't talk to them," he said.
Kelly estimated monetary, emotional distress and punitive damages for the lawsuit at $75 million. "That's the kind of damage awarded needed to send a message to a large corporation like this," she said.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in March that workers 40 or older can sue their employers for practices that favor younger workers, even if there was no intentional bias.
San Francisco Chronicle
Ex-manager of sales sues Deutsche Bank
Whistle-blower says he was fired for talking to SEC
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, May 21, 2005
A former $500,000-a-year sales manager for Deutsche Bank in San Francisco has filed a $20 million whistle-blower suit claiming he was fired, and blacklisted in the industry, for refusing to lie to federal regulators about the giant financial company's trading practices.
The suit by Lawrence Romaneck, filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court, accuses company managers of singling him out to "take the fall for market timing,'' a practice in which he said he never participated.
Market timing is the rapid buying and selling of mutual fund shares to take advantage of price fluctuations. It is not illegal but can hurt long-term shareholders and is therefore restricted by most mutual fund companies.
The Securities and Exchange Commission, accused by congressional critics of ignoring the problem for too long, has recently sued and won large settlements from fund companies for secretly allowing favored clients to engage in market timing.
Romaneck, 56, a 25-year securities industry veteran, was Deutsche Bank's Western regional sales director until he was fired last May. He said in his suit that he learned of market-timing violations in late 2003 and provided documents to the SEC.
After he was subpoenaed in March 2004 to testify before the SEC and the New York attorney general's office, Deutsche Bank tried to get him to limit his testimony and pressed him on what he planned to say, but he insisted he would tell regulators everything he knew, the suit said.
Romaneck was fired "shortly after he refused to submit to (Deutsche Bank's) pressure regarding his testimony,'' attorney Kelly Armstrong wrote in the suit. She said he testified for four hours in July, two months after his dismissal.
After firing him, the company filed a report with the SEC that falsely accused him of wrongdoing and has made him unemployable, Romaneck said. His suit also accuses Deutsche Bank of firing him while he was disabled from a work-related injury, and of cheating him out of commissions.
Deutsche Bank spokesperson Rohini Pragasam said the company would not comment on pending litigation.
