filed the lawsuit back in December.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0It’s one of several suits filed against the city.<\/p>\nFormer Allentown human resources employee Karen Ocasio took the stand Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
Ocasio claims in the lawsuit she was fired because she was outspoken on the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination within the city’s workforce.<\/p>\n
According to the suit, she submitted a discrimination complaint to the city’s solicitor. She says she reported concerns to one of Mayor Matt Tuerk’s top aides and was accused of spreading rumors.<\/p>\n
Ocasio claims she was ignored by Mayor Tuerk when she brought concerns to him.<\/p>\n
On the stand Tuesday, she testified she was kept out of meetings. Ocasio referenced what she says was a planned meeting she was kept out of.<\/p>\n
She says she was working from home that day and went in to scan documents and the Mayor was in a meeting she was supposed to be a part of. Ocasio says the Mayor apologized.<\/p>\n
The city’s legal team says the Mayor didn’t intentionally leave her out and that he apologized.<\/p>\n
Ocasio says in the suit she had gone on medical leave due to an increasingly hostile work environment and the stress it was causing.<\/p>\n
The suit claims she was not given her same position back when she returned.<\/p>\n
Allentown’s former HR director Nadeem Shazad also took the stand Tuesday. He says he told Mayor Tuerk he would not fire Ocasio on hearsay and needed to see if there were sufficient grounds to terminate her.<\/p>\n
Shazad says he shared his observations with the Mayor that Ocasio was doing an excellent job just coming back from leave and performing very well.<\/p>\n
When 69 News previously reached out to the city for comment, it said it does not comment on active litigation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A federal discrimination case filed against the City of Allentown is underway in court. A…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":286601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154],"class_list":["post-286600","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"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286600","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=286600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/286601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}