A federal appellate court Wednesday upheld the summary dismissal of the racial discrimination and retaliation claims of a woman who said her salary was reduced and that she was eventually fired from a Conagra facility in Nebraska after filing a workers compensation claim.
As documented in Brown v. Conagra Brands Inc., Judy Brown, a biracial woman, began working for the company in 1997. She became disabled in 2015 after suffering a workplace injury and filed a workers compensation claim in 2017.
As an accommodation, Conagra temporarily transferred Ms. Brown from her position as a forklift operator to a packaging machine operator. Conagra paid her the higher forklift operator rate until July 2020, when her work restrictions became permanent. The company then cut her pay to the packaging machine operator rate.
Ms. Brown applied for another job but was not selected, despite having more seniority than the successful candidate, and was instead assigned to other shifts for less pay.
She filed a charge of discrimination against Conagra with the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that due to her “disability, record of disability, race and in retaliation for requesting an accommodation and filing a charge of discrimination, [she] was demoted and assigned to a less favorable shift.”
Conagra, which fired Ms. Brown in December 2021, moved to dismiss the case, and a district court judge granted the motion.
The U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals said Ms. Brown failed to plead a viable race discrimination claim and that the facts didn’t plausibly support an inference that Conagra demoted or fired Ms. Brown because of her race. The court said Ms. Brown also failed to plead a disability discrimination claim because she did not plausibly allege that she had a disability.
The proximity between her demotion and her filing of the discrimination charge alone does not support an inference of retaliation, and she did not allege anything else as to causation, the court said.
The court also said Ms. Brown “did not allege anything that immediately precipitated the October 2020 demotion or the December 2021 firing that could give rise to an inference of retaliation.”
WorkCompCentral is a sister publication of Business Insurance. More stories here.
Based in New York, Stephen Freeman is a Senior Editor at Trending Insurance News. Previously he has worked for Forbes and The Huffington Post. Steven is a graduate of Risk Management at the University of New York.