Racial discrimination lawsuits are by definition volatile and messy, hitting arguably the most sensitive nerve in a nation that-while freer and more democratic than any on Earth-remains uncomfortably situated on a historic, fragile fault line that is race relations.
As such, such matters should be treated with care. I attempted to do just that in reporting on several discrimination lawsuits against Cingular Wireless L.L.C. a couple years back.
Cingular fired off an angry letter to the editor in response to the Sept. 20, 2004, article, attacking it factually, highlighting the carrier’s diverse workplace and generally taking umbrage at the editorial judgment to print such a piece in the first place. Does having an enlightened hiring policy mean discrimination can never exist? Does a court’s initial rejection of one of the lawsuits mean that particular suit and all others are meritless and unworthy of news coverage? Turns out those discrimination and retaliation suits against the No. 1 cell-phone operator have been tossed out, though appeals continue to be pursued by one current Cingular employee, Christopher Graham, and one ex-employee, Dennis Moore.
In its Oct, 4, 2004, letter to the editor, Cingular took particular issue with reporting on the Scendis Report, which Cingular commissioned.
“Further, his mention that we hired a consulting firm in the past to help us deal with issues of workplace diversity is just plain wrong,” Cingular officials stated at the time. “We hired that consulting firm three months after Cingular was formed to help determine our culture-benefits, working conditions, etc.-that our employees would find attractive; and to identify the companies that have developed the exemplary type culture we wanted to create so we could benchmark against them.”
The report’s redacted version revealed some African-American men and women at Cingular were highly critical of their workplace environment. Scendis L.L.C.’s job is to help firms prevent sensitive and high-risk workplace issues from becoming high-cost problems. To this day, no federal judge has allowed light to shine on the unabridged Scendis Report.
Last week, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell jumped into the fray. She reported Cingular wants to stick Graham with a legal bill that totals nearly $8,000, even though other similarly situated appellants apparently have not been asked to compensate the wireless carrier for legal expenses. Mitchell also pointed to statistics revealing how difficult it is to win racial discrimination claims in comparison to other employment discrimination cases in federal court.
While Cingular can rightly count itself as a great American company, that should not eclipse the relevancy and newsworthiness of the legal sagas-no matter how desperate-of two American men.
