ERIE - Nine non-white workers who were laid off by Child Development Centers during the COVID pandemic have lost one of their discrimination lawsuits.
Erie federal judge Susan Paradise Baxter on Sept. 16 ruled Deborah Gambill and other plaintiffs represented by lawyers at J.P. Ward & Associates of Pittsburgh on procedural grounds.
Discrimination lawsuits require plaintiffs beforehand to file charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which they did following layoffs in September 2020. By January 2022, they had exhausted their administrative remedies and filed a lawsuit alleging violations of civil rights, discrimination, human relations and wage payment laws.
That case is still pending. In June 2022, the seeds of a new case were planted when lawyers asked Child Development Centers for race data, which allegedly showed a 63.4% reduction in the company's minority workforce during a timeframe that also featured a 16.3% increase in white workers.
They sued in October 2022, more than two years after the layoffs at issue. CDC blamed business woes caused by COVID for letting the plaintiffs go.
This new lawsuit alleged screening policies that had a disparate impact on minorities. COVID was just a front that had the effect of "whitewashing" staff at CDC, they alleged.
Unfortunately for them, Baxter found they engaged in improper claim-splitting and refused to consolidate the second case with the first. They also failed to file an EEOC charge within 300 days of the alleged unlawful employment practice, missing the deadline by a year.
"Here, Plaintiffs contend that their class-based disparate impact claims were within the range of matters that could reasonably be expected to grow out of their initial EEOC charges," Baxter wrote.
"This Court does not agree."
The initial charges alleged only individual discrimination and did not mention class-wide claims based on screening policies, though it did refer to a "number of employees."
"But 'a number of employees' is an indefinite term and does not necessarily imply that Plaintiffs were asserting claims on behalf of anyone other than themselves - i.e., a group of nine individuals who filed contemporaneous EEOC charges arising from the same adverse employment event," Baxter wrote.
"Nor is the Court persuaded that the scope of the agency's investigation into the initial EEOC charges could reasonably have been expected to encompass the plaintiffs' class-based claims as they are now framed.
"Again, unlike Plaintiffs' specific furlough-based individual claims, their class claims are predicated on non-specific 'screening practices' that allegedly impacted a group of individuals beyond 2019-2020, up to and including the present."