Dive Brief:
- A federal judge held July 30 that a White former Starbucks store manager may revise her discrimination suit alleging that the company fired her after wrongly accusing her of racism, but the judge nonetheless granted Starbucks’ motion to dismiss the plaintiff’s claims.
- The plaintiff originally filed her complaint in Langan v. Starbucks Corp. last year, alleging that she was fired in 2021 following an internal investigation. According to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, Starbucks concluded that the plaintiff exhibited “poor leadership, judgment and behavior” and violated its anti-harassment policies. The plaintiff, however, claimed that Starbucks had not informed her of any allegedly poor conduct on her part prior to the firing and denied any violations.
- The plaintiff alleged disparate treatment, claiming that Starbucks treated her worse than similarly situated employees. The court sided with Starbucks, noting that certain claims were barred by statutes of limitations, but it permitted the plaintiff to file an amended complaint addressing defects in some of her claims within 30 days.
Dive Insight:
According to court documents, the plaintiff’s allegations against Starbucks date back to March 2020, when the store she managed temporarily closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around the same time, the plaintiff said Starbucks was in the process of implementing a campaign in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Starbucks initially prohibited employees from wearing clothing and accessories that supported Black Lives Matter before reversing course in June 2020, Restaurant Dive, a sister publication to HR Dive, reported. In Langan, the plaintiff claimed that Starbucks ordered Black Lives Matter shirts for employees to wear during work but that the shirts were sent back because no one could receive them due to the temporary store closure. She alleged that she was nonetheless accused of purposely sending the shirts back.
The court’s decision comes almost one year after a jury in the same district court ordered Starbucks to pay millions in damages to a White manager whose Philadelphia store had been involved in a high-profile racial profiling incident. The parties to that separate suit, Phillips v. Starbucks Corp., informed the court of their intent to settle the matter in March 2024.
