Employee fails to connect racial acts to adverse action

A factory worker sued her employer, alleging the company discriminated against her based on her race by allowing a hostile work environment to pervade its manufacturing plant. She also claimed it retaliated against her for accusing a coworker of tampering with her machine. Let’s take a look at how the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (whose rulings apply to all South Carolina employers) decided the issue.

Facts

Laverne McIver, a black female, worked for Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations in Wilson, North Carolina, beginning in 1996. During her employment, several incidents of clear racial bias/discrimination occurred. One involved a noose being found on the machine of two black employees in another department in 2006. McIver didn’t see the noose personally but did see a picture of it. The person who hung it, however, was a white coworker on her team.

In 2008, McIver alleged that one of her coworkers caused the machine she worked on to malfunction. She filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 2009.

Between 2009 and 2013, McIver didn’t personally experience any more racial animus, but other racial incidents occurred at Bridgestone. In either 2012 or 2013, two racist caricatures of Trayvon Martin were drawn in bathrooms. The first drawing appeared in the men’s bathroom of the MTS department. She viewed the drawings after someone told her about them. At another point, two monkeys made of tire tubing were found hanging from machines in Bridgestone’s tubing department. The exact date of those incidents is unclear, but both occurred much earlier than 2018.