Employees Allege Race Bias in Turner Industries Group Lawsuit

Filed under: News, Race and Civil Rights

More than 200 current and former workers at Turner Industries Group of Baton Rouge, an industrial services company, have filed a discrimination lawsuit saying that workers there hurled racial slurs and jokes and displayed drawings of nooses, swastikas and Aryan Brotherhood symbols.

The company has flatly denied any harassment or discrimination and in fact stands for diversity and inclusion.

The statements from each side leave no middle ground in observing the case. Either the black workers are lying or the white company owners are.

It's hard to believe that hundreds of workers could all be under the same delusion of seeing nooses, racist graffiti and segregated bathrooms at their workplace.

Yvonne Turner, who worked at the company, said a protective suit was stuffed, tagged with her name and hung from a noose. She said when she told a supervisor about it, he laughed.

Another worker, Cheryl Falola, said employees were separated by race at another Turner facility and that she was harassed repeatedly by a white man who worked with her.

Turner officials said many of the plaintiffs no longer work for the company and that some others never did. The Turner CEO Roland Toups said his company records show few of the plaintiffs ever complained to their supervisors about the harassment.

Without benefit of EEOC records filed in the case, it's tough to decide which side is telling the truth.

But the one factor that makes me lean towards the workers' side is that an April 2010 EEOC investigation found that black workers were in fact subjected to racist behavior at a Turner plant in Paris, Texas. The EEOC found that Turner managers knew about the hostile work environment but did nothing to fix it.



Is it possible that plaintiff lawyers, smelling the chance for a quick buck after last year's EEOC ruling, engineered a campaign to further smear the company with new bias complaints?

Anything is possible, I guess. I mean, didn't we all believe Tawana Brawley when she first made her accusations?

But what seems far more likely to me is that Turner Industries was home to an environment poisoned by racism and did nothing to address it.

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