A longtime municipal employee last week filed a federal lawsuit claiming racial discrimination by the town.
A part-time records manager hired by the town in December 2006, the plaintiff is an African-American woman older than 40, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court by Danbury-based attorney Josephine S. Miller.
The plaintiff had filed a complaint last spring with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities claiming age and race discrimination. According to the new lawsuit, the town was served with a copy of the CHRO complaint on May 15, and the following day officials told the plaintiff that she “was no longer to sit at the desk of her supervisor,” the chief building official, “on any occasions when he was out of the office.”
Yet that manager “has always permitted employees under his supervision, including Plaintiff, to sit at his desk whenever he is out of the office, for online training, online testing or private calls,” Miller wrote in the complaint, received Feb. 14 by the town.
It continued: “Prior to this directive from [the town’s human resources director], Plaintiff had never previously been isolated, nor had any distinction made between herself and other employees” under the manager.
The following month, June 2024, “Plaintiff was informed that her work hours had been reduced to 19 hours per week at the direction of the [human resources director],” the complaint said, though her “work schedule has been approximately 25 hours per week for many years.”
The town violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by taking “adverse action against Plaintiff because she complained of what she reasonably believed to be racial discrimination,” it said, and “has been damaged” by the retaliation.
The lawsuit seeks a jury trial as well as “[f]ull back pay from the date of Plaintiff’s reduction of working hours, taking into account all raises to which Plaintiff would have been entitled but for her unlawful and retaliatory reduction of work hours, and all fringe and pension benefits of employment, with prejudgment interest thereon,” the lawsuit said. The plaintiff also is seeking compensatory damages for “emotional distress, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life and special damages,” the lawsuit said, and attorneys fees and costs.
[Comments are disabled on this article.]