By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Amazon.com won the dismissal on Tuesday of a lawsuit accusing the online retailer of discriminating against a Black former employee by reducing her duties and putting her on a performance improvement plan.
U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian in Manhattan said former Amazon Music event producer Keesha Anderson failed to show Amazon gave her a poor performance rating as a pretext to discriminate, or waited until Black and Hispanic women became her supervisors before questioning her work.
Subramanian also said Amazon offered “legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons” for not promoting the Staten Island, New York, resident, including that it wanted a strategist with skills she lacked.
The case had drawn attention among the first to apply an April 2024 U.S. Supreme Court decision that workers need not show concrete injuries such as pay cuts, demotions or firings to pursue federal employment discrimination claims.
Anderson is reviewing her next legal steps, her lawyer Jessie Djata said in an email.
“We continue to believe that our client was subjected to discrimination (and) raised important concerns about fairness and equal opportunity at one of the world’s largest companies,” Djata said.
Amazon and its lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
WARNING OVER DELETED RECORDINGS, FABRICATED QUOTATIONS
While Subramanian let the case proceed in May 2024, it ran into trouble when Anderson acknowledged deleting conversations with coworkers and managers that she had secretly recorded.
Moreover, an unnamed “whistleblower” who allegedly flagged Seattle-based Amazon’s effort to sideline Anderson turned out to be the Hispanic manager, who was quoted in Anderson’s complaint as saying things she never said.
Subramanian rejected Amazon’s request to sanction Anderson and her lawyer, but said their conduct “toes the line on what constitutes sanctionable conduct” and should not be repeated.
“Putting the now-discredited allegations concerning the ‘whistleblower’ to the side,” Subramanian wrote, “the case paints a picture of a run-of-the-mill workplace, maybe even one with more positivity than usual.”
Anderson claimed that Amazon excluded her from meetings and events, rejected her ideas and limited her duties to administrative tasks, before putting her on a performance improvement plan based on minor, “trumped up” allegations.
She quit Amazon after 2-1/2 years in February 2022 for a higher-paying job at Snapchat parent Snap.
The case is Anderson v. Amazon.com Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, 23-08347.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Comments