Eleven Black utility workers filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Peoples Gas in Chicago, Illinois, on Nov. 28. The lawsuit claims that the company “discriminates against its African American employees and customers.”
The plaintiffs, including Jason Towns, Garland Eleby, Letitia Jackson, Karen Lanford, Tamia Nunn, Reginald Scoggins, Christopher Trass, Darryl Woods, Ericka Garmon, Shawnda Simmons, and Laticia Daniel, all say they were subjected to working in “a hostile environment” that included being called the N-word, “blackie,” “lips,” and “boy.” One supervisor allegedly once said they needed to “crack the slave whip.”
The workers also claim that “their safety and lives are not valued” at the company and they were forced to follow different rules than non-Black employees.
The lawsuit states that being Black and an employee of Peoples Gas “can be a life-or-death job” because most of the plaintiffs were “physically assaulted and robbed on the job, including at gunpoint.” It also accused the company’s non-Black employees of “open disdain and differential treatment” of Black customers and of expressing “shock” when seeing them with “nice homes and two-parent families.”
“Peoples Gas’s racially biased culture and discriminatory policies and practices harm African American employees and customers and put their lives at risk,” reads the lawsuit. “Peoples Gas’s brazen disrespect of and disregard for Black lives ranges from steering its African American employees to dangerous working conditions without adequate security to forcing its African American customers to dig up their own gas service lines for reconnection, a dangerous and demeaning endeavor.”
Garland Eleby recalled his first day of work and said he heard a white co-worker use a racial slur.
“Nobody flinched,” said Eleby. “Nobody looked up or asked, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you?’ Nothing. It rolled off…
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