Ajayi v. Aramark Business Services, Inc.
| Citation | 336 F.3d 520 |
| Decision Date | 26 June 2003 |
| Docket Number | No. 02-2670.,02-2670. |
| Parties | Lola AJAYI, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ARAMARK BUSINESS SERVICES, INC., Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (7th Circuit) |
James T. Derico, Jr., (argued), Derico & Associates, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
James A. Burns, Jr. (argued), Katten, Muchin, Zavis & Rosenman, Chicago, IL, for Defendant-Appellee.
Before FLAUM, Chief Judge, COFFEY and KANNE, Circuit Judges.
Lola Ajayi, an African-American woman born January 12, 1956, brought this race-discrimination, age-discrimination, and retaliatory-discharge suit against her former employer, Aramark Business Services, Inc., under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C.2000e-2 et seq. (2003), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 29 U.S.C. § 621 et seq. (2003), and 42 U.S.C. § 1981. Ajayi identified as discriminatory thirteen adverse employment actions, including her eventual termination, which she also alleged was in retaliation for her having filed an EEOC charge. Aramark moved for summary judgment. In granting Aramark's motion, the district court (1) dismissed Ajayi's ADEA claim because she did not properly raise her age claims in her EEOC charge; (2) found that most of the thirteen complained-of actions taken by Aramark did not result in a "materially adverse change" in Ajayi's employment as required to be actionable under the antidiscrimination statutes; (3) found that Ajayi could not establish that similarly situated individuals outside of the protected class were treated more favorably with respect to her remaining failure-to-promote and discriminatory-discharge claims; and (4) found that Ajayi had no direct evidence of retaliatory discharge nor evidence to suggest that Aramark's stated legitimate reasons for terminating Ajayi were pretextual. Ajayi appeals. We affirm with respect to the age — and race-discrimination claims, and reverse and remand on the retaliation claims.
According to Aramark, Ajayi was an unexceptional employee who was terminated for violating company vacation policy and for dissatisfactory job performance.
Ajayi's relationship with Aramark began in March 1996, when she was hired to work as a food-service supervisor at one of Aramark's Chicago, Illinois cafeteria locations. In a performance evaluation given in 1997, Ajayi received a four on a five-point scale.
In 1998, Aramark acquired a new dining-services account with Harris Bank. The bank had three locations in the Chicago Loop in need of cafeteria services: 111 West Monroe, 311 West Monroe, and an executive dining room on the 37th floor of the 111 West Monroe Building. Greg Kaminski (white male), an Aramark general manager, interviewed Ajayi and promoted her to the front-of-the-house-supervisor position ("FOHS") at the 111 location. As FOHS, Ajayi's duties were to supervise the cafeteria cashiers and ensure that the 111 cafeteria was ready for business. Ajayi started work at 111 on August 1, 1998, making $13.00 an hour.
While working at 111, Ajayi was twice written up for insubordination by her supervisor, Ramiro Lopez1 (Hispanic male). On January 19, 1999, Ramiro gave Ajayi her first written warning; the second he gave her a few weeks later on February 4, 1999, citing her failure to follow instructions and for showing up late four days in a row. On her March 1999 performance evaluation, Ajayi received mediocre marks (in six out of twelve categories she received a two on the five-point scale) with her evaluator observing that Ajayi was unmotivated and had poor relations with her supervisors. Despite the written warnings and the less-than-stellar review, however, Ajayi received a fifty-cent per hour pay increase.
In July 1999, Ajayi was transferred to 311 and given the position of unit supervisor, which was essentially a lateral move for Ajayi — the new position at 311 was the equivalent of her former FOHS job. But the new position did present the potential for further advancement. Kaminski informed Ajayi at the time of the transfer that should she prove successful in her new position, she would have the opportunity to be promoted to food service director of 311. Even though she was at a new location, Ramiro remained her direct supervisor.
Aramark defined success for Ajayi in her new position at 311 largely by whether she met certain monthly targets for food costs, labor costs, and direct costs. Ajayi did not meet these targets and, as a result, didn't get the promotion.
Instead, Aramark decided in December 1999, that it was going to eliminate her position at 311 altogether, in order further to contain operating costs, and demote Ajayi to cashier, which would reduce her wages to $8.00 per hour. She was told of this decision on January 24, 2000, and received a memo to that effect on February 9, 2000.
As it turns out, Ajayi was not demoted and continued to work as 311's unit supervisor for several months. Then, in May 2000, the assistant vice-president of Harris Bank, Joseph Mullen (African-American male), claims he received several complaints from 311 customers about Ajayi. Because Mullen was the Harris Bank employee responsible for handling complaints with Aramark's cafeteria services, he claims he relayed these comments verbally to Kaminski. On May 2, 2000, Aramark wrote Ajayi up on account of Mullen's complaints — her third written warning. The letter informed her that she would be immediately suspended from work for three days and upon her return, she would be demoted to cashier.
Meanwhile, Ajayi had decided to take some time off from work. She had prior plans to be out of the office on May 2 for medical reasons, and the day before, she had decided to inform Aramark of her intentions to extend those out-of-office plans to include a vacation from May 3 to May 16.
Aramark's vacation policy required an employee to request and receive supervisor approval for vacations at least two weeks in advance. So, on May 1, when Ajayi approached Ramiro with a two-week vacation request on the last day she planned on being in the office before leaving, Ramiro told her that she couldn't expect to receive approval on such short notice. Nevertheless, Ajayi claims Ramiro never expressly denied her vacation request. And since in the past Aramark employees hadn't received express notice of Aramark approving their vacation requests, Ajayi assumed that Ramiro's failure expressly to deny her request meant that she was free to leave.
As far as Aramark was concerned, Ajayi assumed unwisely. First, her supervisors couldn't find her on May 2 to deliver her third written warning in person and inform her of her impending suspension and demotion. Aramark construed Ajayi's continued absence as evidence of job abandonment, and in a letter dated May 11, 2000, Kaminski informed Ajayi that if she failed to report for her new job assignment as a 111 cashier by May 17, 2000, Aramark would process her termination the following day. Sometime in the interim, Kaminski also contacted Mullen and requested that he document his complaints against Ajayi.
The situation came to a head on May 17, when Ajayi returned to work at 311. (She apparently never received Kaminski's May 11 letter requesting her to report as a cashier to 111.) Ajayi received her third written warning and was suspended.
While Ajayi served her suspension, Mullen sent Kaminski an email on May 17 in which he documented receiving several complaints about Ajayi since 1998 and requested that Kaminski take appropriate action. On May 19, 2000, Kaminski sent Ajayi a letter informing her that she had been terminated for violations of the company's vacation policy and for dissatisfactory job performance. Ajayi didn't receive the letter before she finished serving her suspension, and on May 22, Ajayi returned to work. She intended to deliver her letter of resignation to Kaminski, but he told her she had already been fired. She received the letter in the mail later that same day.
Ajayi tells a different story. She notes that she quickly became dissatisfied with the FOHS position at 111. The cashiers she managed there did not respect her authority and would not follow her instructions. She also expected to be, but was not, trained to do cash-register readings and to count down the safe and the accounts.
Ajayi's biggest problem, however, was that she perceived Ramiro to treat his Hispanic subordinates — and one cashier in particular, Lourdes Lopez (Hispanic female, no relation) — better than he treated Ajayi. Specifically, she says Ramiro required Ajayi, but not Lourdes, to clean and make coffee, required Ajayi and her African-American coworkers, but not Lourdes and her Hispanic coworkers, to adhere strictly to Aramark's tardiness and time-clock policies, and more frequently required audits of African-American cashiers than of Hispanic cashiers.
Moreover, Ajayi claims Ramiro twice wrote her up for insubordination only because he didn't like her and instead favored her Hispanic colleagues. She also notes that Ramiro issued the written warnings only after she had complained to Kaminski about his favoritism.
Ajayi's situation worsened after the transfer to 311. She claims that Kaminski's conditioning of future promotion on her ability to meet the profitability targets was unfair given that she lacked authority to control certain factors — such as personnel and food-purchase decisions — that would influence target labor and operating costs. Nevertheless, she notes that she came closer to hitting the targets than did the former food service director for 311, John Bluck (white male). Ajayi thus believes Kaminski transferred her to 311 under the pretense of advancement while intending her to fail all along.
For Ajayi, these discriminatory suspicions were confirmed on February 9, 2000, when she received the memorandum informing her that Aramark planned to...
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