Court: Combine the F word and the N word in the workplace and that's enough for a trip to the woodshed

By adamg - 10/14/09 - 8:35 pm

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld a fine against a Chelsea private-security company at which a supervisor ended a dispute with a black employee by cursing him out with an obscene word and a racial epithet.

The ruling means Augis Corp. has to pay Franklin McCreath $10,000 for the incident, which happened in 1999 (Ed. note: Yes, 1999) at the Hammond Park Condominiums in Brookline, where McCreath worked as a security guard.

At the end of an argument, a supervisor with whom McCreath had butted heads in the past told him what he really thought of him. When the company did nothing about the matter, McCreath filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. In no uncertain terms, the court agreed today with the commission that you can't refer to a black worker in a particular way:

We think that a supervisor who calls a black subordinate a "fucking nigger" has engaged in conduct so powerfully offensive that the MCAD can properly base liability on a single instance. That term inflicts cruel injury by its very utterance. It is degrading, it is humiliating, and it is freighted with a long and shameful history of humiliation, the ugly effects of which continue to haunt us all. The words have no legitimate place in the working environment -- indeed, they have no legitimate place -- and there is no conceivable justification for their use by a workplace supervisor.

Complete ruling.