LITTLE ROCK — Steel giant Nucor Corp. must pay $1.2 million to a half-dozen former and current black employees for racial discrimination at its northeast Arkansas plants.
A predominantly white jury awarded the damages to five Arkansans and a Tennessean last week in federal court. It agreed they suffered a racially hostile environment because of job-site images of nooses and company-sold symbols of the Confederacy, repeated references to apes and threatening gestures from co-workers and supervisors. Including punitive damages against the company, the jury awarded each man $200,000.
Last week’s verdict follows another blow dealt to Nucor Corp. in a related case in South Carolina. Black workers there have claimed similar discriminatory practices. And the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in August agreed to let the lawsuit include all black Nucor employees who have worked there since December 1999. That trial could start next year.
Meanwhile, similar class action status is being sought for Arkansas workers.
“The clients are saying that other employees are coming forward and want to be included,” Bob Wig-gins, a Birmingham, Ala., lawyer whose firm represents the workers in both states, said in an interview. “The evidence showed [the discrimination] was continuous, from the time the plant opened to the present.”
He said that Judge Susan Webber Wright of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Arkansas denied class-action status, just as her South Carolina counterpart had done. But Wiggins said he will appeal.
“In the bigger picture, it’s about getting Nucor to treat its black employees with the same decency and respect as they give other employees,” Wiggins said in a statement.
His law firm’s fees have not yet been awarded.
Wiggins said the firm’s take will not come out of the plaintiffs’ $1.2 million.
Though the main company also was found at fault - and Nucor Chief Executive Daniel DiMicco was head of the Blytheville plant when the men were discriminated against - a Nucor spokesman directed questions to its subsidiary in Arkansas. That company said it will appeal the verdict.
“We have absolutely no tolerance or patience for discrimination,” Nucor-Yamato General Manager Doug Jellison said in a prepared statement. “We will continue fighting this one issue for as long as it takes to show how unfair and wrong these allegations are.”
He pointed out the failure of the plaintiffs to win class action status in Arkansas and that they did not get the $21million they sought.
Charlotte, N.C.-based Nucor is among the largest domestic steel producers. It employs about 1,500 people at two Blytheville-area plants, including one its owns with Nucor-Yamato, a joint-venture with a Japanese company that Nucor controls.
The discrimination cases began as a single lawsuit in 2004 before ultimately splitting into their respective states.
The five men in the Arkansas case contended that Nucor denied them training for promotions and involuntarily transferred one of them in retaliation, but those notions were rejected in court. Two of the men remain employed with Nucor, Wiggins said.
Among the evidence to support their claims of racial discrimination were several gorilla images and postings of Confederate-flag stickers around the plant and instances where racial slurs were broadcast over the plant’s radio system. One of the men said two co-workers confronted him at work with a burning cross. Another said a supervisor responded to a racial-discrimination charge by hanging a rubber chicken by its neck near his work station. Jurors, 11 of whom are white, ultimately agreed on Thursday that Nucor was aware of the harassment and failed to stop it.
Business, Pages 27 on 11/04/2009