“
We are seeing an increase in larger race harassment cases,” said Anna Park, regional attorney for the EEOC's Los Angeles district office. “The nature of them has gotten uglier. There’s a more blatant display of hatred with the N-word, with imagery, with nooses.
All the violence you’re seeing in the news, it is manifesting in the employment context.” In a state as diverse as California, offenders span all races and ethnicities, she said. “Two decades ago discrimination was viewed as a Black-white paradigm," Park said.
"The feeling was minorities can’t be discriminating. But it could be Asians discriminating, it could be Latinos discriminating. Regardless of what color you are, you don’t get a free pass.” Now about 300 Black workers are gaining compensation, some as much as tens of thousands of dollars, through the Inland Empire settlements. Cardinal agreed to pay $1.45 million.Ryder and Kimco Staffing Services, which supplied workers to Ryder, settled for $1 million each.
The warehouse operators and their staffing firms — including a Glendale temp agency, AppleOne, which supplied workers to Cardinal — must offer extensive harassment training in English and Spanish and submit to stringent monitoring for verbal abuse, bias and retaliation. The Los Angeles Times contacted more than two dozen current and former Latino workers from Cardinal and Ryder. None agreed to an interview.
Nationwide, EEOC records show prejudice can afflict any race or ethnicity, but Black victims predominate. Over the last decade, the agency has won settlements in 171 race discrimination suits involving Black workers, 59 cases involving Latino victims, 12 involving Asian victims and six involving white victims. Though the agency tracks the race and ethnicity of victims, it does not compile official statistics on offenders.
Nor are there databases of private cases categorized by perpetrators' race. This makes it hard to gauge the extent of anti-Black hostility from Latino workers. But court filings, victims' allegations and employer records show that in the last decade, about a third of anti-Black bias suits filed by the EEOC’s Los Angeles and San Francisco offices involved discrimination by Latinos, about a third involved white offenders and a third were unspecific.
The suit against Cardinal Health and AppleOne was graphic. Since at least 2016, the EEOC alleged, Black workers were subjected to the N-word by co-workers and managers “many times per day…including ‘n— bytch', ‘lazy ass n— ain’t did no work all day,’ and ‘Look at those n—looking like monkeys, working like slaves like they should be.’” The first worker to file a complaint described being called anti-Black slurs in English and Spanish, facing prejudice from a Latina supervisor and being deliberately run over with a cart by a Latino co-worker. Photos taken by Black workers showed a women’s restroom defaced with graffiti: “N— stink up the aisles” and “Black pipo stink." A men’s restroom was defaced with “n—killer." In a court filing, Cardinal acknowledged "derogatory graffiti," but said it was promptly removed. A spokesman declined to address other worker allegations, citing the EEOC’s post-settlementstatement: “Cardinal Health and AppleOne have put in place measures aimed at preventing discrimination and harassment." AppleOne, which placed 1,000 workers at Cardinal over two years, said in a statement it “did not control the workplace” but has implemented “improvements” to its policies ordered by the EEOC.
On a sunny morning in Rialto, Simmons, wearing a dashiki revealing forearm tattoos of a mermaid and a panther, was perplexed that the abuse at Cardinal Health had come from Latino colleagues. He choked up as he described his ordeal.
Man sits on step outside house. Leon Simmons said he complained to managers about poor treatment. "But nobody investigated," he said. "Nobody cared." (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)
Growing up in Compton, Simmons had Mexican American friends. And over decades at other jobs — forklift driver, custodian, security guard — “Hispanics, whether they liked you or not, they kept it to themselves,” he said. As for the few white workers at Cardinal Health, “Never no problem with them,” he said.
