Women win bias lawsuit vs. city

The Supreme Judicial Court sided yesterday with five African-American women who said they were treated harshly and differently than a white male co-worker during layoffs when they were abruptly evicted from their workplace, a ruling one lawyer called a significant victory in the fight against employment discrimination.

The decision ended a 13-year battle that had started with a Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination complaint and eventually reached the state's highest court.

The five women -- Gloria Coney, Belinda Chambers, Victoria Higginbottom, Marlene Hinds, and Betty Smith -- worked for Boston's Healthy Baby/Healthy Child program in Hyde Park in July 1994 when they were suddenly told their services were no longer needed.

Coney said the experience that day was horrific and unexpected. She was called into an office and instructed to leave immediately, she said.

Her every move was monitored as she packed her belongings, she said. She was interrogated, her lunch pail was searched, and her books, including a dictionary, were examined, she said.

Co-workers stood by watching and crying, she said. Some asked if the women were being taken to jail.

"If you ask me how many minutes that took, I could not tell you," she said in a telephone interview yesterday. ". . . All of that is a blur. I can't even begin to describe the emotions I was feeling and going through and at the same time holding up my head."

Coney said she cried all night after she was confronted late in the afternoon in her office and given a half-hour to gather her things and leave. She said she felt her employer had acted on the assumption that "black women steal things."

Hinds had her two daughters in the office with her that day, according to the ruling, and the girls asked their mother if her employer thought she was going to steal something.

Christopher Navin, a white man who was also laid off, was treated differently, according to the court ruling. He was notified ahead of the layoff and was allowed to move freely around the office, saying goodbye to co-workers.

The suit names the city's Trustees of Health and Hospitals, which oversaw the program. Lawyers for the trustees argued that the nature of the women's jobs differed from Navin's in that they had access to confidential client records. They also expressed concern about possible vandalism or sabotage.

But the court said that three of the five women did not have access to confidential files and that there was no evidence that any of the employees facing layoffs was "prone to violence, vandalism, or theft."

The trustees also had a layoff procedure that was to be used for all employees, the court said.

The court concluded that the trustees had "a discriminatory hierarchy in who would be spared from the layoff procedure, with white males at the top, women below them, and African-American women at the bottom."

Christine Hayes, who represented the trustees in the case, could not be reached for comment late yesterday

Coney said yesterday she was happy with the court's decision.

"It has not been easy," Coney said. "I have not saved up the amount of money that I need to retire probably and I'll be working for a while, but mentally I'm in a good place."

She pushed the case in the courts while raising a grandson on her own. "Every place I went I took that poor boy," she said. "And I know he benefited from it. He saw me fighting. He saw that spirit. I wanted him to truly understand that . . . you have to fight for what you believe in."

One lawyer not connected with the case said Coney's fight will change how employers and courts approach discrimination cases.

"It's a very important decision, and obviously it reminds us how long these battles can go on," said Ellen Zucker, a lawyer for Burns & Levinson and an adjunct law faculty member at Suffolk University. "It's too bad, in fact, that instead of recognizing when discrimination and inhumane treatment occurs and fixing it, the response of the trustees was to fight and fight."

Zucker said the case shows that the tools courts have developed to determine whether discrimination has occurred should not be applied without a sense of context. It also means that employers' actions as well as words, can be considered discrimination. In this case, it was not the layoff, but the humiliation the women endured in the process that constituted discrimination.

"The people who have litigated this case have done us all a service, because they make it less likely next time that supervisors would decide to treat one group more generously than another," she said.

Coney said she hopes that is the outcome.

The incident changed her life, she said. She took up Buddhist practices to cope with the stress and joined groups like the Massachusetts Commission for the Status of Women to do outreach and help prevent similar discrimination from happening to others.

"I'm taking women and pushing them into places they never thought they'd be going," she said. "Depending on how this works out, I would love to go on the circuit and help motivate people to stand up and fight."