A Texas jury has awarded nine Black and one white former employees of a telecom company $70 million after they won a racial discrimination lawsuit against their former employer.
The collective alleged the company not only punished Black people for checking their phones while on the clock but separated the Black employees into two surveilled rooms in the office for executives to monitor.
A court ruled that Glow Networks Inc. and its parent company, CSS Corp exposed some of its former Black employees (and one white by extension of his advocacy for his Black co-workers) to a hostile work environment. The north Texas court awarded the group $70 million for the offense.
Court documents reveal there were originally fourteen members in the group suing Glow Networks, Inc., alleging that they had “both tangible actions, such as terminations and denials of promotions, and on the alleged creation of a hostile work environment.” However, four members of the group had claims that were dismissed by the court.
Joshua Yarbrough, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said that he witnessed institutional discrimination at the company. When he was a lead engineer at the company, he noticed the company installed surveillance cameras in two of the eleven rooms in their Dallas office.
He said, “The African-Americans were pushed right in front of the cameras, and we realized that we were watched closely.”
Read full story at Atlanta Black Star here.
