Joey is a white employee at the Acme Afro-Sheen Skin Care company who was recently informed that he would be transferred to a research unit in Alaska because he did not “fit in” with the company’s culture. The legal issues in this case are job discrimination and harassment, which is a violation of Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Halbert & Ingulli, 2018). Joey could sue the company and argue that he faced discrimination on the basis of his race and sexual harassment from his female colleagues.
Joey’s possible suit has numerous strengths and weaknesses. Firstly, the strength of filing a violation of Title 7 is that it encompasses transfers and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin. However, its weakness is that Joey does not have any physical evidence of discrimination such as an official company letter. Secondly, the strengths of the discrimination suit include the fact that he is the only white employee in his unit and one of the few men, suggesting a certain bias within the hiring department. Furthermore, his supervisor did not provide him with any justification for the transfer to Alaska beyond Joey’s inability to adapt to the office environment. However, the weakness of this case is that the supervisor could claim that hiring people of a particular race serves a “compelling” interest in court due to their client demographics (Halbert & Ingulli, 2018). Thirdly, the strength of the harassment suit is that Joey witnessed female employees making comments about him and giving him “funny looks.” However, since the women’s comments were made in Spanish, it is impossible to definitively state that they concerned Joey, and there was no explicit confrontation between them.
In conclusion, Joey should wait to receive an official letter from the company and see what reasons they provide for the transfer. After that, he should sue them for employment discrimination and win on the basis of Title 7. He could argue that the company had hired him despite knowing that he had a different ethnic background and spoke a different language, and thus there is no “compelling interest” involved in this case. However, Joey should not file a harassment suit because he would probably lose due to the lack of any evidence.
Reference
Halbert, T., & Ingulli, E. (2018). Law and ethics in the business environment. Cengage.