Allentown human resources employee Karen Ocasio<\/a> claims she was fired because she was outspoken on the issue of racial and ethnic discrimination within the city’s workforce.<\/p>\nThe courtroom heard closing arguments from both Ocasio’s attorney as well as the city’s legal team Wednesday. It’ll now be up to the jury to determine the suit’s outcome.<\/p>\n
Ocasio’s lawyer says this is his client’s only chance.<\/p>\n
He says evidence in her favor is a lot more corroborated than what was presented by the city.<\/p>\n
Her lawyer is making the case that Ocasio was promoted and was a good employee, citing testimony from the city’s former HR director Nadeem Shazad Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Ocasio’s lawyer went on to say that Ocasio was not toxic, despite what the city says an outside investigation revealed.<\/p>\n
He says two of Ocasio’s directors testified she was a good employee.<\/p>\n
Ocasio’s attorney says the attorney doing the outside investigation had financial incentive since she was being paid $175 per hour by the city to work on it. He claims it’s a report only the attorney working on it and Mayor Tuerk knew about.<\/p>\n
Mayor Tuerk had testified Tuesday that he never had any contact with the attorney conducting the outside investigation.<\/p>\n
The city’s defense team said during closing arguments the Mayor has no animosity and never had an agenda against Ocasio.<\/p>\n
They say, in the outside investigation that was done, that 13 people who worked with Ocasio said she was the most complained-about employee.<\/p>\n
They say the attorney who did the outside report gave a full accounting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – A federal discrimination lawsuit filed against Allentown is now in the hands of a jury.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":287506,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,232],"class_list":["post-287505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-allentown-area"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287505","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=287505"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287505\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}