Sattar v. Motorola, Inc.

• Citation: 138 F.3d 1164
• Decision Date: 12 March 1998
• Docket Number: No. 96-3084,96-3084
• Parties: 76 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 512, 72 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,203 Wamiq SATTAR, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. MOTOROLA, INC., et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit)

Page 1164

138 F.3d 1164

76 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 512,

72 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,203

Wamiq SATTAR, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. MOTOROLA, INC., et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 96-3084.

United States Court of Appeals Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 21, 1997.

Decided March 12, 1998.

William J. Juneau, Dale A. DeLoriea, Lavelle, Juneau & McCollom, Oak Park, IL, Christopher J. Agrella (argued), Franklin Park, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Hans U. Stucki, Ann M. Hamilton (argued), Motorola, Incorporated, Law Department SHS, Land Mobile Products, Schaumburg, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before BAUER, CUDAHY, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge.

After enduring a lengthy campaign of religious harassment from his supervisor, Wamiq Sattar was first transferred to a different section, then placed on probationary status, and finally was terminated from his position as an engineer for Motorola. Believing that the supervisor's religious intolerance lay behind his termination, Sattar sued Motorola and his two immediate superiors, raising claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1), and under state law. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants on Sattar's Title VII claims and dismissed the state law claims without prejudice, declining to retain them under its supplemental jurisdiction. Although, taking the facts as Sattar presents them, it is plain that the supervisor behaved in a manner entirely unbecoming a person in a society that requires tolerance for the religious views of all, we agree with the district court that the summary judgment record does not support Sattar's claim.

I

Sattar is a native of Bangladesh, which until 1971 was known as East Pakistan. Like most of his compatriots, Sattar began life as a Muslim. Some twenty years ago, he moved to the United States, where he attended college. After graduation, he married a Lutheran woman and began regularly attending Lutheran services. In January 1990, Motorola hired Sattar to work as a staff engineer in the Personal Communications Network Group (PCN) at Motorola's Arlington Heights, Illinois, facility. Shortly thereafter, Motorola hired Arif Pardesi, who became Sattar's immediate supervisor. Pardesi is from Pakistan (formerly known as West Pakistan). Like Sattar, he was raised in the Muslim faith, but Pardesi remained a devout--one might say zealous--Muslim. Jerry Campbell, the other individual Sattar named as a defendant, was Pardesi's supervisor.

Almost immediately after he started to work with Sattar, Pardesi began hounding him about his abandonment of Islam. The summary judgment record is replete with examples of Pardesi's badgering. Two weeks into their relationship, Pardesi warned Sattar that he (Pardesi) would watch Sattar "like a hawk." Pardesi constantly advised Sattar to follow the teachings of the Koran and to join Pardesi and other Muslims who worked at Motorola for weekly prayer sessions in Pardesi's office. Pardesi sent literally hundreds of e-mail messages to Sattar between January 1992 and June 1993 with citations to the Koran and dire warnings of the divine punishments that awaited those who turned their back on Islam.

Pardesi also made no secret of his view that Sattar's fate at Motorola lay in Pardesi's hands. On one occasion, he told Sattar that "Allah is the solution to all problems" and that "nonbelievers will be condemned to hell." When, in the summer of 1990, Pardesi promoted several of Sattar's coworkers and passed over Sattar, he told Sattar that "we need Khaliphas to lead the mission" and that Sattar would never be a Khalipha. (According to Islamic teachings, a Khalipha is a divinely inspired leader.) Going further, Pardesi expressly told Sattar that if he returned to Islam it would improve his standing in the eyes of his superiors.

Sattar responded by asking Pardesi to approve his transfer to another department--a request Pardesi flatly refused. Next, in June 1990 Sattar made a formal complaint about Pardesi's harangues to a human resources manager at Motorola. He made a second complaint in December 1990 to Motorola's human resources director, Martin Rogers. At that time, Sattar informed Rogers that Pardesi had forced a manager to downgrade a performance review of Sattar's work. The original draft, which Sattar had seen, had placed him at a 2.2 (satisfactory) level, but Pardesi ordered the writer to rewrite it and place Sattar at a 1.5 (unsatisfactory) level. Sattar also told Rogers about his unsuccessful efforts to transfer to another department. Rogers promised to investigate but never did so.

Other signals Sattar was receiving from Motorola were more positive. In 1991, he was temporarily loaned to another group, in which his performance was good enough to prompt the supervisor to write a complimentary letter for the file. Pardesi, however, refused to include the letter when the supervisor sent it to him, commenting again to Sattar that he didn't see him "as a Khalipha." Sattar also received two certificates from the Motorola Award and Recognition Program for his "outstanding achievement," one in November 1991 and the other in October 1992. In two other performance reviews, he received "satisfactory" ratings.

Notwithstanding those signs of success, after his return in August 1991 to Pardesi's direct supervision, Pardesi told Sattar that he had been ranked lowest in his grade level at a managers' rating and ranking session. These were meetings at which all the higher managers in the organization assembled to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each employee. These rankings were independent of the performance reviews. In early 1992, Pardesi assigned Sattar to a particularly difficult project, which at least three other engineers had attempted without success. Sattar, too, had trouble with it. In December of that year he finally succeeded in transferring away from Pardesi's control. He informed his new supervisor, David Yen, that he believed that Pardesi was "out to get him" for not being a devout Muslim. For the first few months in Yen's section, Sattar was finishing up the project for Pardesi. Pardesi removed Sattar from the project in February 1993, with the comment that his work was "technically deficient," and replaced him with another engineer. That person was also unable to finish the work, which was reassigned to yet another engineer.

In April or May 1993, at another group ranking and rating session, Pardesi expressed the opinion that Sattar lacked competence in the use of a particular computer language, that he had logged false overtime, and that he had taken credit for work written by another engineer. By this time, of course, Yen was Sattar's supervisor. The consensus at the meeting was that Sattar ranked at the bottom of all job grade E09 engineers in his group. In keeping with Motorola's policies, Yen decided that Sattar should be placed in a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), in which his work would be monitored closely. At Motorola, if an employee placed in a PIP successfully completes the program he may continue working; if not, he is fired.

Yen wrote the first draft of Sattar's PIP, but with input from Pardesi, according to Sattar. Yen asserted that he would have put Sattar on a PIP even if Sattar had not been having problems on the Pardesi project. In June 1993, Yen left the picture and Lisa Vecchio became Sattar's PIP supervisor. Vecchio redrafted the part of the PIP that described the specific tasks Sattar had to accomplish in order to "pass" the program, but she otherwise continued on the course Yen had set. Sattar, in the meantime, informed Christine Ioriatti, the person who supervised both Yen and Vecchio, about Pardesi's actions and threats. Ioriatti referred him (once again) to the human resources department, where he told Rogers of Pardesi's harassing e-mails. Within weeks of those meetings, the e-mails stopped. Soon thereafter, Pardesi transferred to a position in the United Arab Emirates.

Sattar completed the PIP on October 18, 1993. He alleges that Vecchio told him on that day that "you passed the PIP," but that he would not be notified formally until October 21. On the latter date, he learned that he was being terminated immediately. The PIP finding was mixed: while he had successfully completed the technical portions of the program, he was found to be lacking in "leadership, consistency, initiative, and responsibility skills." At the time Vecchio and Ioriatti met with him to pass along the bad news, Sattar alleges, Ioriatti told him that "Mr. Pardesi's activities have caused this termination; you should have done something about Pardesi's harassment long ago," such as obtaining a transfer away from Pardesi.

II

Sattar named as defendants not only Motorola, but also Pardesi and Campbell "individually and in their corporate capacity." The district court correctly dismissed the complaint against the individual defendants. It is by now well established in this court that "a supervisor does not, in his individual capacity, fall within Title VII's definition of employer." Williams v. Banning, 72 F.3d 552, 555 (7th Cir.1995); see also Bryson v. Chicago State University, 96 F.3d 912, 917 (7th Cir.1996). Since Sattar (for obvious reasons) has not alleged that Pardesi and Campbell are the sole owners of Motorola, we need not consider whether either individual has any "corporate capacity" separate from Motorola itself. EEOC v. AIC Security Investigations, Ltd., 55 F.3d 1276, 1280 n. 2 (7th Cir.1995); cf. Cook v. Arrowsmith Shelburne, Inc., 69 F.3d 1235, 1241 n. 2 (2d Cir.1995) (holding open the "issue of whether ... an individual may be made a party defendant solely in the person's corporate capacity as an agent of the employer--not subject to individual liability but a party for the purpose of discovery"). For purposes of the Title VII claim, therefore, we consider only Motorola's responsibility.

Sattar's claim in ...