A witness made a filing under oath that supports two workers’ claims in their charges against Patriot Contractors. The two workers’ Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) charges say that a company Superintendent used frequent slurs—including the N word and “f*ggot”—and threatened violence. Then, when a coworker—who Patriot knew was and still is battling cancer—stood up for the victim, the Superintendent retaliated, forcing him, the cancer patient, to perform work that was painful due to his disclosed cancer treatment.
The witness says in the new filing that the Superintendent repeatedly called one of the workers a “pineapple f*ggot;” used slurs including the N word, “wetback,” “sp*c,” and “queer;” and rejected job applicants while saying things like “oh, they’re in the Navy, they’re probably a f*ggot,” and “nope, he’s black, he’ll be lazy.”
This witness’s filing says she called Patriot’s Human Resources manager about monthly and complained to her about the Superintendent’s harassment—in fact, in some of these calls, the witness told HR that someone had quit because the Superintendent called them a racial slur. HR would just respond “well, that’s just [the Superintendent,] I’ll talk to him,” or “oh, I thought he calmed down, I’ll talk to him”—and the Superintendent kept behaving the same way. The filing says that Patriot’s Reno site would go through as many as three to five employees per week in peak hiring season–new hires would come in for one or two days, or might not even finish their first day, and then they would not come back, because of how this Superintendent behaved.
The witness’s filing even says that Marty Cook, the company owner, said about a female worker: “she’s just a bitch, we all know it.”—and that Cook, along with Patriot’s Operations manager and the Superintendent, often laughed about that female employee being a “bitch.”
The witness who came forward to provide this evidence had worked for several other construction companies before Patriot, and is familiar with the way people normally talk in this industry—but the witness had “never before worked in an environment like the one at Patriot, where constant racial slurs and offensive sexual and sexual orientation-based speech were openly tolerated.”
If you have information to share about the events described by this witness, or additional information about racial and sexual harassment at Patriot Contractors’ Reno site as described in the two charges, please contact us at 212-308-4338, email attorney@employmentlawfirmpc.com, or fill out a form on our website.