Dive Brief:
- Georgia Military College properly terminated an African American HR administrative assistant as part of a campus-wide reduction-in-force due to declining revenues, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held Feb. 20 (Gray v. Board of Trustees of the Georgia Military College).
- For the RIF, brought on in part by the 2020 COVID pandemic, each department head was told to eliminate one position, according to court records. The vice president of HR said she chose the administrative assistant position because most of the other HR employees had held the job or a similar one and its duties were the easiest for the department to absorb.
- The administrative assistant was the only African American in an otherwise all-White, 7-person HR department, court records reflected. She sued the college for alleged race discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 11th Circuit said she failed to show the stated reason for eliminating her position was a pretext for discrimination. It upheld summary judgment for the college.
Dive Insight:
With tariff, immigration and new DEI policies spurring concerns about layoffs, employers should remember that Title VII still applies to RIFs, according to current guidance from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The guidance, directed toward small businesses, cautions employers to make sure a layoff or RIF is based on nondiscriminatory reasons, rather than on a characteristic protected by federal law, such as race, color, national origin, disability, sex, pregnancy, age or genetic information.
Georgia Military College was entitled to judgment on the HR administrative assistant’s claim because the reason it gave for eliminating her position was legitimate, and the evidence failed to suggest that reason was a cover-up for discrimination, the court held.
According to the record, the HR administrative assistant was responsible for answering phone calls, greeting visitors, scanning personnel records for new hires and terminated employees, processing purchase orders, and completing employment verification forms.
She argued that, contrary to what the college asserted, her position was “not actually the easiest” to absorb. She pointed to a statement from a co-worker expressing concern that eliminating her position would mean the other HR employees would have to perform more work.
However, “any reduction in force would require the remaining employees to absorb the work that had been performed by the employee whose position was eliminated,” the 11th Circuit pointed out. Nothing in the co-worker’s statement called into question that if an HR position had to be eliminated, hers would be the least burdensome on the remaining employees, the court said.
The 11th Circuit also upheld summary judgment against the HR administrative assistant on her Title VII retaliation claim.
In that claim, she alleged the college terminated her because she complained about a White employee in another department who had posted an inflammatory comment about the protests over George Floyd’s murder.
As support, she said she was terminated “merely four weeks” after she complained.
But the record showed the college began planning the RIF at least two months before she complained, the 11th Circuit noted. It also informed her when she complained that the employee who made the post was no longer at the college.
“We simply cannot say that the temporal relationship between [the worker’s] protected activity and her termination is enough to allow a reasonable jury to infer that she was terminated in retaliation [for that activity],” the appeals panel said.
She was one of 10 employees from different departments laid off as part of the RIF, the 11th Circuit noted. Ultimately, her challenge “boils down to a quarrel with a business decision about how best to organize and operate the human resources department; it does not establish pretext,” the court concluded.
