Five current and former Long Beach city employees have settled their lawsuit in which they alleged the city has disproportionately kept Black employees in lower-paying and unclassified positions, rejected their requests for promotion and equal pay and also created an anti-Black culture among city workers.<\/p>\n
Attorneys for tech worker Christopher Stuart, Eric Bailey \u2014 who retired from the Public Works Department in 2021 \u2014 tech secretary Deborah Hill, administrative aide Sharon Hamilton and administrative analyst Donnell Russell Jauregui filed court papers Wednesday with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge David Cunningham III informing him of an \u201cunconditional\u201d resolution of the case.<\/p>\n
No terms were divulged.<\/p>\n
\u201cTogether, we experienced race-based pay and promotion discrimination, a hostile work environment, retaliation and saw the adverse effects of the city\u2019s failure to prevent these forms of mistreatment,\u201d Stuart said in a sworn declaration. \u201cI am bringing this case not only to seek accountability for what I\u2019ve experienced, but also to stand with my co-plaintiffs who faced similar injustices.\u201d<\/p>\n
In her declaration, Hill questioned the fairness of the Wonderlic exam, a timed cognitive ability assessment used by employers and schools to measure problem-solving, learning capacity and aptitude.<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom my experience, the exam felt culturally biased,\u201d Hill said. \u201cMany of the questions and scenarios seemed to be based on personality traits and life experiences that do not reflect how I, and other Black employees I know, were raised.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hill said the cultural upbringing of Black people influences how they respond to certain situations and she says the Wonderlic exam did not account for that.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a result, it created an unfair barrier for qualified Black candidates seeking advancement,\u201d Hill contended.<\/p>\n
The workers alleged that they were paid less than non-Black coworkers, repeatedly denied promotions and that they suffered backlashes when they complained.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll five plaintiffs\u2019 claims flow from the city\u2019s common employment policies and a pattern or practice of discrimination against Black employees, as reflected in the similar experiences with unequal pay and promotion that each plaintiff had,\u201d the plaintiffs\u2019 attorneys stated in their court papers.<\/p>\n
The experiences of the five individuals overlap because the same supervisors, managers, and\/or human resources personnel were involved, according to the suit filed in June 2021.<\/p>\n
In their court papers, attorneys for the city said some of the plaintiffs\u2019 claims were time-barred. The defense lawyers also said that the alleged examples of a failure by the city to follow the law that were cited by the plaintiffs encompassed more than 20 years and that in reality the decisions at issue were made by different people, refuting the plaintiffs\u2019 claim of a continuing violation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five current and former Long Beach city employees have settled their lawsuit in which they alleged the city…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28494,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[109099,174,109100,109101,131,133,132,108305,75269,11469,3299],"class_list":{"0":"post-243242","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-long-beach","8":"tag-alleging","9":"tag-beach","10":"tag-blacks","11":"tag-disparate","12":"tag-long-beach","13":"tag-long-beach-headlines","14":"tag-long-beach-news","15":"tag-plaintiffs","16":"tag-settle","17":"tag-suit","18":"tag-treatment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}