ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A former Allentown human relations officer alleges Mayor Matt Tuerk forced out older, minority employees in favor of young, white employees.<\/p>\n
The claim comes in a lawsuit filed this week.<\/p>\n
The lawsuit filed on behalf of Tatiana Tooley claims she was supposed to transfer to a new position of DEI manager, but instead of getting the new role, she was terminated in what she says is a pattern of ageist and racial discrimination at city hall.<\/p>\n
In the 15 page lawsuit, Tatiana Tooley a 56 year old Latina claims that while she was a Human Relations Officer for the city of Allentown, Mayor Matt Tuerk told her she was going to transition to a new position of Diversity and Equity and Inclusion Manager.<\/p>\n
Tooley claims as time when on that transfer didn’t happen, and that some of the duties for the job she was promised were transferred to a younger, white employee who lacked the necessary experience.<\/p>\n
She says during that time, she watched Mayor Tuerk fire or discharge a number of older, minority employees in senior positions and replace them with younger, white employees.<\/p>\n
The filing says,\u00a0“It became increasingly clear to Mrs. Tooley that Mayor Matt Tuerk had no intention of formally and officially transitioning Mrs. Tooley to a position under his direct supervision in the Office of the Mayor due to her age, race and national origin.”<\/p>\n
We reached out to the City of Allentown for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This isn’t the only claim of alleged ageism or racial discrimination filed against the city.<\/p>\n
This is a developing story. Stay tuned to 69 News for more information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A former Allentown human relations officer alleges Mayor Matt Tuerk forced out older, minority employees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154,433],"class_list":["post-263531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown-area","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-lehigh-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}