Stephanie Williams v. CSX Transportation

533 F. App'x 637
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedSeptember 19, 2013
Docket12-6197
StatusUnpublished
Cited by9 cases

This text of 533 F. App'x 637 (Stephanie Williams v. CSX Transportation) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Stephanie Williams v. CSX Transportation, 533 F. App'x 637 (6th Cir. 2013).

Opinions

OPINION

PER CURIAM.

Plaintiff-Appellant Stephanie Williams is suing her employer, Defendant-Appellee CSX Transportation Company, Inc. (“CSX”), under Title VII for subjecting her to a sexually hostile work environment. Williams alleges that she was treated differently from male employees, confronted on one occasion with racist and sexist remarks by CSX employee Jeff Wingo, and continually exposed to pornography left out in the open in her workplace. The district court excluded Williams’s pornography allegations from its analysis on the grounds that they were insufficiently related to her EEOC filings, and found no evidence to indicate that Williams’s alleged adverse treatment was based on sex, except for the confrontation with Wingo. The district court granted summary judgment to CSX on the ground that the single confrontation with Wingo was neither severe nor pervasive enough to constitute a sexually hostile environment. Williams appeals. We affirm on an alternate ground supported by the record.

I.

We laid out most of the relevant facts in Williams v. CSX Transportation Co., Inc., 643 F.3d 502 (6th Cir.2011) (Williams I):

Stephanie Williams began working as a clerk for CSX at its Bruceton, Tennessee, facility in April 2002.... Clerks’ duties include, among other things, performing janitorial work.... Among her coworkers and supervisors at the Bruce-ton facility, Williams was the only black employee and the only female employee.
Williams alleges that, between 2002 and 2004, her supervisors treated her differently than her white male counterparts. First, she asserts that Ed Anderson, a supervisor, required her once to clean feces off the walls of a restroom and out of a urinal, and that her white male counterparts never had to complete such a task. Second, Williams alleges that Anderson ordered her on four separate occasions to strip the restroom floor using an inappropriate tool. Williams requested a power tool from Anderson, who told her it was not in the budget. A different supervisor, Tim Magargle, once permitted a white male clerk to rent a power tool to complete the same task. Third, Williams alleges that Anderson refused to reimburse her for the mileage expense of driving her personal vehicle twice weekly during 2003 from Bruceton to New Johnsonville, Tennessee — even though corporate policy was to reimburse such mileage and the white male employees in her office received reimbursement. Fourth, Williams asserts that her car was vandalized: the right exterior was “keyed,” and the tires on the same wheel were punctured five successive times, resulting in five flat tires.
In addition to these incidents, Williams alleges that a single racist and sexist confrontation occurred at the CSX Bruceton facility. According to Williams, Jeff Wingo and Tim Magargle, two supervisors, were watching the Republican National Convention on television on the evening of September 2, 2004 when Williams entered and indicated she did not want to watch. Wingo allegedly told Williams that she was a Democrat only because she was a black [639]*639woman; that unmarried women cannot “have the love of God in their heart[s]”; and that this country should “get rid of’ Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton because without those two “monkeys” the country “would be a whole lot better.” The following day, Williams alleges that Win-go told her that if she returned to school, she would not have to pay for her education because she was a single black mother....
Williams also alleges that Wingo made two racist statements in passing to her between one to six months before the confrontation. Wingo once asked Williams why black people cannot name their children “stuff that people can pronounce, like John or Sue.” He also told Williams that black people should “go back to where [they] came from.” .... Williams does not allege that any of her coworkers or supervisors other than Wingo ever made a single sexist or racist remark.

Id. at 505-06. Also, Williams’s co-workers kept pornography magazines at work, which they sometimes left in plain view on tables and in an unlocked locker.

Two months after the Wingo incident, on November 9, 2004, Williams lost her job at the Bruceton facility.... First, CSX eliminated the position of another one of the Bruceton clerks. That clerk then exercised his right under CSX policy to displace a more junior employee at the Bruceton facility, and that more junior employee in turn exercised his right to displace Williams — who had the shortest tenure of the four Bruceton clerks. After this occurred, Williams exercised her own displacement right to obtain a clerical position at CSX’s Nashville facility.

Id. at 506.

After Williams lost her job at Bruceton, she filed a “Charge Information Form” with the EEOC:

In that filing ... Williams recounted the Wingo incident in detail. She alleged that the elimination of the other clerk’s position, which led to her dislocation to the Nashville facility, was in retaliation against her for the anonymous call to the CSX ethics hotline reporting the Wingo incident. She also alleged, independently, that her dislocation to the Nashville facility was an act of discrimination based on her race and sex.

Id. She also wrote: “It is a very hostile work environment. If my supervisors had properly done their jobs ..., I could have worked [at Bruceton].” Then, the EEOC completed a second filing on Williams’s behalf, a “Charge of Discrimination”:

The general thrust was that discrimination and retaliation caused Williams’s dislocation to the Nashville facility. The allegations mentioned neither Wingo’s conduct nor any other indication of a hostile work environment; however, the second sentence stated that Williams was “subjected to unequal terms and conditions of [her] employment.” Within a field entitled “discrimination based on,” three boxes were marked: “race,” “sex,” and “retaliation.” Within a field entitled “date(s) discrimination took place,” the “earliest” date listed was September 2, 2004 (the date of the Win-go incident). Immediately below, the box indicating that the discrimination was a “continuing action” was marked.

Id. at 506-07. Neither of the filings mentioned pornography:

Williams sued CSX in federal district court for discrimination, retaliation, and both sexually and racially hostile work environments. The district court granted summary judgment to CSX [on Williams’s discrimination and retaliation claims] ... Williams does not appeal the disposition of those claims....
[640]*640As to her claim of a sexually hostile work environment, the district court granted summary judgment to CSX on the theory that Williams failed to exhaust her administrative remedies: she did not file a “charge” containing sufficient allegations of a hostile work environment. As to her claim of a racially hostile work environment (which did not require exhaustion), the district court permitted Williams to proceed to trial. At the close of Williams’s case in chief, however, the district court granted judgment as a matter of law to CSX. The district court believed that Williams’s evidence of a racially hostile work environment was not sufficiently “severe or pervasive” to create a jury question on that claim.

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533 F. App'x 637, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/stephanie-williams-v-csx-transportation-ca6-2013.