Jute v. Hamilton Sundstrand Corp.

• Citation: 420 F.3d 166
• Decision Date: 23 August 2005
• Docket Number: Docket No. 04-3927-CV.
• Parties: Donna S. JUTE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HAMILTON SUNDSTRAND CORP., Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit)

420 F.3d 166

Donna S. JUTE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HAMILTON SUNDSTRAND CORP., Defendant-Appellee.

Docket No. 04-3927-CV.

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

Argued May 17, 2005.

Decided August 23, 2005.

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Barbara E. Gardner, Manchester, CT, for Appellant.

Felix J. Springer, Day, Berry & Howard, Hartford, CT (Daniel A. Schwartz, Douglas W. Bartinik, Day, Berry & Howard, Hartford, CT, of counsel), for Appellee.

Jason M. Mayo, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Washington DC (Eric S. Dreiband, General Counsel, Lorraine C. Davis, Acting Associate General Counsel, Vincent J. Blackwood, Assistant General Counsel, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Washington DC, of counsel), for Amicus Curiae Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Before: MESKILL, NEWMAN and CABRANES, Circuit Judges.

MESKILL, Circuit Judge.

In this appeal from a summary judgment entered in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, Covello, J., we are asked to determine the scope of Title VII's anti-retaliation clause forbidding an employer from retaliating against an employee who has "testified, assisted, or participated in any manner" in a Title VII related proceeding. We previously have held that an employee who offers testimony in a Title VII lawsuit squarely engages in a form of statutorily protected activity. We now determine that such protection extends to an employee who is named as a voluntary witness in a Title VII suit, but who is never called on to testify. Our previous interpretation of the anti-retaliation clause and the congressional intent behind Title VII lead us to this conclusion. We therefore affirm the district court's determination that the employee in this case "participated" in protected activity for the purposes of alleging her retaliation claims.

However, we conclude that the district court erred in its summary dismissal of those claims. First, the court neglected to recognize and weigh certain adverse employment actions as relevant background evidence, and second, it impermissibly limited the suit to only those accusations explicitly raised in a retaliation charge filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Finally, we hold that the district court prematurely dismissed an allegation that the defendant-employer retaliatorily furnished a negative job reference. Absent these errors, a factual record sufficient to withstand summary judgment exists.

Therefore, we affirm the judgment of the district court in part, vacate it in part, and remand for trial.

I.

As we must, we relate the facts of this dispute in the light most favorable to the plaintiff.

In August 1986, Donna S. Jute began working for Hamilton Sundstrand Corp. (Hamilton), a corporation headquartered in Connecticut that designs and manufactures aerospace products. For approximately fourteen years she worked in various hourly wage positions with the company. On January 11, 2000, Jute was terminated along with nineteen other employees in her pay grade. Hamilton asserts that Jute's termination was the result of a post-merger reorganization, whereas Jute claims it was retaliatory.

Specifically, Jute contends that Hamilton began to retaliate against her immediately after she was named as a witness in a co-worker's Title VII lawsuit.¹ The plaintiff in that case, Maryanne Brunton, claimed that in June 1994 — while she campaigned for an executive board position with the union representing Hamilton's hourly employees — sexually disparaging flyers about her were posted throughout the workplace. In response to these postings, Hamilton initiated an internal investigation. Apparently at both Brunton's and Hamilton's separate requests, Jute provided two statements to investigators in which she attested to witnessing a female co-worker leave the denigrating flyers in a company restroom.

Based on the foregoing incident, in December 1995, Brunton sued Hamilton, as well as her union and its president, alleging that she had been subjected to a hostile work environment. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. The Brunton litigation progressed for approximately three years, during which time Jute's 1994 statements to the Hamilton investigators were incorporated into the record. In addition, Jute agreed to testify on Brunton's behalf. To that end, Jute saved several vacation days to ensure that she could readily take time off from work to be deposed. Moreover, during a deposition conducted on July 9, 1998, Brunton named Jute as the sole witness who had observed another employee posting the flyers in the women's restroom. Before Jute was called to offer deposition testimony of her own, the Brunton lawsuit settled.

The day after Brunton's July 9, 1998 deposition, Jute claims that she heard her supervisor, Natonia Crowe-Hagans, angrily "storming down the hall" toward Jute's workstation. Crowe-Hagans confronted Jute and removed her from a team (the "JDE team") that was upgrading Hamilton's computer system, even though she had been working as a technician with the team for well over a year. Jute suggests that this demotion was particularly suspect given that, in a formal performance appraisal, a supervisor had deemed her work with the team to be a "tremendous asset," and in July 1998 the project was at a critical stage. In addition, the post with the JDE team offered Jute a unique opportunity for career advancement at Hamilton. Jute asserts, for example, that she had been promised a salaried position or a pay raise if her productivity with the team continued.

Initially, Jute did not suspect that her removal was traceable to the Brunton litigation. In December 1998, however, Jute contacted Brunton to ask whether she would be deposed sometime in early December, otherwise she was prepared to use her saved vacation days during the Christmas holiday. It was during this conversation that Jute learned for the first time that the case had settled, and more significantly, that Brunton had named Jute as a favorable witness during the July 9 deposition. Now suspicious, Jute approached Hamilton's Manager of Human Resources, Ingrid Delgado, about the situation. According to Jute, Delgado instructed her to "find another job" as the harassment was "never going to stop." In this suit, Jute points to Delgado's statement as direct proof of retaliatory animus.

In addition to the removal from the JDE team, Jute alleges that after Brunton's deposition, and over the course of two years, Hamilton engaged in numerous other retaliatory acts. First, in August 1998, Hamilton informed Jute that she was no longer needed to teach an evening aerobics class at Hamilton, a position Jute sought to supplement her income. Second, in September 1998, Hamilton elected not to promote Jute to a higher pay grade despite Crowe-Hagans' alleged earlier promise to do so. Third, in September 1998, Jute served as a "cutoff" for promotion training, meaning that Jute and employees less senior than she could receive a promotion only if they worked nights.² Fourth, in September 1999, Jute was denied a promotion despite having completed the requisite training. Fifth, in September 1999, Hamilton denied the JDE team leader's request that Jute accompany the team on business trips.³ Sixth, in December 1999, Jute was denied a salaried position with Hamilton — a position that might have insulated Jute from layoffs aimed at hourly employees that were part of a post-merger corporate restructuring. Seventh, as part of the restructuring, Jute was fired in January 2000. Finally, Jute claims that following her termination she was "blackballed" when she was not referred to International Fuel Cells (IFC), a company related to Hamilton, for future employment. Thus, while other former Hamilton employees with less experience than Jute were interviewed and hired by IFC in the winter and spring of 2000, IFC never contacted Jute.

On May 18, 2000, Jute filed a charge of discrimination with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CCHRO) and with the EEOC. In the charges, Jute specifically alleged that Hamilton retaliatorily (1) terminated her in January 2000; (2) denied her a salaried position in January 2000, making her vulnerable to the impending layoff; and (3) withheld a promotion in September 1999, although she had completed the necessary training. On October 5, 2000, the CCHRO dismissed Jute's charge, finding that further review was not likely to reveal a wrongful firing. Separately, on December 5, 2000, the EEOC issued a right to sue letter.

While her administrative charges were pending before the CCHRO and EEOC, Jute secured an interview for a position with IFC. Jute claims that she was offered a job with the company in November 2000, but that the offer was subsequently withdrawn. Jute contends that the position was rescinded because of comments her former supervisor, Byron Yost, made during a reference check. Yost apparently advised an inquiring IFC representative that he had been directed not to discuss matters pertaining to Jute because she "had a lawsuit pending" against Hamilton. Technically, this comment was not true. At that time Jute had only filed administrative charges with the EEOC and CCHRO.

II.

Two months after Yost's comment, in January 2001, Jute filed a complaint against Hamilton alleging retaliation under Title VII and Connecticut state law.⁴ See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq.; Conn. Gen. Stat. § 46a-60 et seq. Following numerous settlement attempts and a period of discovery, Hamilton moved for summary judgment dismissing the complaint. In a comprehensive, twenty-two page published opinion, the district court granted the request on the basis that Jute failed to establish a prima facie case of retaliation. See Jute v. Hamilton Sundstrand Corp., 321 F.Supp.2d 408, 419 (D.Conn.2004). In so doing, the district court agreed with all of Hamilton's arguments but one, agreeing with Jute that her involvement in the Brunton...