FORT VALLEY, Ga. (WGXA) -- Bus manufacturing company, Blue Bird, headquartered in Fort Valley, is in the spotlight again after two former black female employees have alleged they were fired after they reported sexual harassment and discrimination amongst labor workers within the Blue Bird company. Their attorney said they were discriminated against as well for blowing the horn on the wrongdoings within the workplace.
They're now asking for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate claims of racial and gender discrimination.
Their attorney is Tamara Holder, a nationally recognized women's rights and civil rights attorney.
Blue Bird has received recent media coverage after workers voted for a union after going on strike seeking higher pay, more regular schedules, and better vacation and sick time. Now, the company could have a separate legal battle to navigate.
"They observed pay disparity between black workers and non-black workers," said Holder via a Thursday Zoom call. They observed pregnancy discrimination where the company refused to provide accommodations to at least two pregnant women."
She said they also observed drug testing discrimination; drug tested more often than others.
"When they brought them up, they were ignored."
Not only were they ignored, they were fired. Holder says her clients have claimed it's because they're black.
"How did the idea of race come into this, instead of two women coming together and saying 'hey, we're observing this,' asked Finney.
"Blue Bird ignored them, and therefore retaliated against them and fired them...They believe that they were treated differently than white female workers who were in a similar position of HR," responded Holder.
Georgia is an at-will employment state, meaning an employer can terminate employment without being required to give any justification for the decision. However, Holder says employers cannot discrimintarily fire employees.
"You cannot get away with discrimination by saying, 'Oh, we're an at-will state,' which is a common defense for people who don't understand discrimination and the Sole Rights Act of 1964," said Holder. They don't understand that you still cannot discriminate."
Holder says challenging decisions such as this could take years.
"So what we're (currently) doing is we're trying to find out how the company handled discrimination if there are any other complaints," said Holder. "So, we will be filing more complaints if more people come forward, and we're in the information-gathering stage at this point".
Holder said the EEOC is aware of the claims. As for what is next, Holder said there would be an investigation, after which she and her clients could possibly settle or potentially file a lawsuit in federal court.
Holder said others who believe they have experienced discrimination or sexual harassment may file their own claims if the event(s) occurred within 300 days of the filed claim.
WGXA reached out to Blue Bird for comment but has not received a response at the time this article was published.
Credit: TNS
This story was originally reported by Michael E. Kanell in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on May 18, 2023
Two human resources employees say they were fired for telling managers of bias in hiring, pay and drug testing
Two former Blue Bird employees have filed complaints with a federal agency charging the iconic bus manufacturer with racial discrimination.
The two women, both Black, have asked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate their charges that they were recruited by the Fort Valley-based company to work in the human resources department, but were fired in recent months after they told their superiors in management of discriminatory practices in hiring, pay and drug testing.
Company officials did not respond to requests for comments this week from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The complaints add another chapter to the stories of trouble at Blue Bird, the largest employer in Peach County. On May 11, wage workers voted for representation by the United Steel Workers. Supporters of the drive complained about pay and the treatment of workers.
Three days after the vote, Chief Executive Matthew Stevenson abruptly departed — “for personal reasons,” the company said — and was replaced by his predecessor. Three days after that, Stevenson was named president and chief executive of Kentucky-based Holley Inc., which designs, makes and sells a range of high-performance products for cars and trucks.
The unfolding events come as the bus maker is poised to ride a wave of potentially lucrative work as a beneficiary of funding from recently passed federal legislation aimed at fueling the electric vehicle industry.
Those measures included more than $10 billion for clean public transit and school buses nationally, much of it targeted to replacing existing school buses with zero-emission and low-emission models. Also, Georgia schools have been awarded $50.8 million to buy buses, while communities in the state are receiving $31 million to purchase transit buses, according to a release from the White House.
The women alleging discrimination were not wage workers and were not among the workers eligible to vote on unionization, so their firing had no direct relation to the union drive, said Tamara Holder, the attorney representing both. “But I think these complaints are parallel. I think there is a problem with the climate there.”
The AJC agreed not to use the names of the women filing complaints at this point because of their fear that they would be punished in their next job search. Complaints filed with the EEOC are not public, according to a spokeswoman for the agency. However, when the agency believes a complaint has merit and takes the matter to court, that action would be public, she said.
EEOC investigations can last months or years. After an investigation, the EEOC can sue on behalf of the women in federal court. As part of their complaint, the women have asked to be paid damages for the alleged harm suffered, but have specified no amount, according to Holder.
Black employees are the vast majority of the front-line, lesser-paid jobs at Blue Bird — 1,176 of the 1,463 wage workers, said attorney Holder, citing a count last fall by the company itself. Of the 227 salaried employees, 41 were Black.
The senior of the two women said that while problems at the company involved racist and misogynist behavior, the issues were even broader than that. She said she had been hired last June after a career of more than two decades in the field.
She had been lured away to head Blue Bird’s human resources, she said, from a company where she had been a vice president. “I was the only female African American at that level.”
From the start, things seemed wrong, she said.
Most executives worked from corporate offices in Macon, but she was placed in what she said was a rat-infested office at the Fort Valley manufacturing facility. “Then I had to purchase my own office supplies, my own printer, my own mouse and mouse pad.”
She was fired in October.
In her filing with the EEOC, she said she was fired for complaining about a workplace “rife with discrimination,” but also with health and other violations.
“They were not respectful of workers,” she told the AJC.
Among the allegations:
— Rules for drug testing were stricter for the wage workers, most of them Black, than for the salaried employees, most of them white,
— Women on the cleaning crew were routinely victims of sexual harassment by men who walked into bathrooms where they were cleaning and made lewd comments, unzipped their pants and urinated in their presence.
— Pay for new white workers was routinely set higher than for Black workers in similar positions.
— The company resisted efforts to provide accommodations — like chairs — for women workers in a late stage of pregnancy.
“It’s not okay what they have been doing,” said the less senior of the women, who said she was recruited from a job on the West Coast last summer to work in human resources at Blue Bird.
