Beasley v. Health Care Service Corp., 90-2699

• Decision Date: 20 August 1991
• Docket Number: No. 90-2699,90-2699
• Parties: 56 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 1047, 57 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 40,950, 60 USLW 2191 Glenda BEASLEY, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HEALTH CARE SERVICE CORP., d/b/a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Marion, Illinois, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 1085

940 F.2d 1085

56 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. 1047,

57 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 40,950, 60 USLW 2191

Glenda BEASLEY, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. HEALTH CARE SERVICE CORP., d/b/a Blue Cross/Blue Shield of

Marion, Illinois, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 90-2699.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued July 10, 1991.

Decided Aug. 20, 1991.

Darrell Dunham (argued), Ronald L. Isaacs, Norma J. Beedle, Carbondale, Ill., for plaintiff-appellant.

Richard Shaikewitz, Samuel A. Mormino, Jr. (argued), Wiseman, Shaikewitz, McGivern, Wahl, Flavin & Hesi, Alton, Ill., for defendant-appellee.

Before CUDAHY and EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judges, and PELL, Senior Circuit Judge.

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge.

Glenda Beasley is a Christian fundamentalist who strongly believes that God is the most important thing in her life. She sued her employer, Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Marion, under Title VII for religious discrimination, claiming that Blue Cross told her to make her job the number one priority in her life and allowed fellow employees to harass her for her religious beliefs. After a bench trial, the district court entered judgment for Blue Cross, and Beasley now appeals. We affirm.

I

Blue Cross processes Medicare claims under a contract with the federal government. It hired Beasley on May 23, 1984 as a Reasonable Charge Specialist and promoted her to supervisor fourteen months later. In January 1986, Beasley attended a company-sponsored weekend training session for supervisors. The training session was designed to improve the supervisors' communication and management skills. One part of the training involved teaching supervisors how to analyze and classify their subordinates ¹ and handle them in various situations. During another part of the training, the supervisors were told that they had to make Blue Cross their number one priority. Although Beasley did not object immediately to any aspects of the weekend training, she claimed that the classification training and the requirement to make Blue Cross number one put her under "extreme tension and ... caused her to alter her behavior in the workplace."

Beasley's work performance--as reflected in her employment file--began to deteriorate a month after the seminar. Beasley's supervisor, Barbara Harrigan, "counseled" Beasley on February 3, 1986 about visiting with friends during hours. On February 4, Harrigan wrote a memo claiming that Beasley improperly delegated a job responsibility to a subordinate. Alleged proof of Beasley's misconduct, however, was a memo dated February 6--two days after Beasley was reprimanded. This and similar inconsistencies supported Beasley's argument at trial that Blue Cross padded her personnel file with negative and subjective work evaluations in order to justify her later discharge. Harrigan explained that the inconsistencies were innocent errors that were caused by her inability to write some memos, because of a paperwork backlog, until a week or two after incidents occurred.

In late February 1986, Blue Cross received an anonymous letter which complained that Beasley was "a religious nut" who was "harassing her unit in a religious manner." The personnel manager at Blue Cross, Dave Hoover, conducted an investigation and concluded that the complaint was invalid because no one came forward to substantiate the allegations in the letter. ² Later, an employee named Pine Price was involved in a dispute with Beasley involving the use of a personal computer and called Beasley "a religious hypocrite." In another incident, Beasley was accused of leaving religious pamphlets in the restroom. In the weeks that followed the anonymous letter incident, Beasley repeatedly requested to see the letter and to be told details of the investigation. A meeting was held between Beasley, Hoover and the company's attorney, Ken Richmond, to discuss the incident. During the conversation Beasley agreed that her priorities were "God first, family second, and job third."

In May 1986, Harrigan reprimanded Beasley because her unit incorrectly processed a large number of claims. Beasley was transferred to a less prestigious job that did not provide an administrative assistant. The lack of an assistant, coupled with an arthritic knee condition, allegedly caused Beasley to take a disability leave in June 1986. During the three-month leave, however, Beasley went on a three-week missionary trip to China. ³ Many of Beasley's fellow supervisors were angered upon learning of the trip because they had to cover Beasley's work while she was gone. One of these supervisors, Jacque McCarty, was particularly incensed. McCarty seems to have disliked Beasley from the start, opposing the decision to make her a supervisor and nicknaming her "Bible Bertha." When Beasley returned from her disability leave, she and McCarty had a number of clashes. As a result, Blue Cross transferred McCarty to the mail room to keep her and Beasley separated. ⁴

Conflicts between Beasley and Harrigan also continued after Beasley's return. Harrigan gave Beasley an unfavorable evaluation, and Beasley in turn wrote a letter to the company president charging Harrigan with religious discrimination and requesting an independent evaluation. A meeting between Beasley, Harrigan and several Blue Cross executives on October 13, 1986, failed to resolve the dispute. On November 18, 1986, Beasley filed a complaint with the Illinois Department of Human Rights and the EEOC, alleging that she was being discriminated against on the basis of her religion.

In December 1986, Beasley was assigned to supervise a new unit. The unit was created to update the payment levels that Blue Cross would honor under its contract with the government. The unit recalculated these cost figures and entered the new data into a computer. Beasley's new supervisor, Tom Bartels, approached her on the first day in the department and told her not to harass the other employees in the unit on religious subjects. Bartels had no concrete evidence that Beasley had ever harassed employees in this way, he had just heard a rumor and wanted to warn Beasley that proselytizing on company time was not permitted. Beasley worked in the new position until January 1987 and then started a second period of disability.

Beasley returned to her old position under Harrigan in April 1987 after having surgery on her knee. Conflicts soon arose. Beasley claimed that she could not perform her old job the way that Harrigan wanted it performed. As a supervisor, Beasley was supposed to pass out assignments and monitor the performance of her subordinates. Because of her knee problems, however, she put the assignments in a box on her desk and had the employees come to her for work. Harrigan thought that this was inefficient and that Beasley should use a wheelchair to perform the work the way Harrigan wanted it done. Beasley countered that the aisles were too narrow for a wheelchair. About a week after starting back to work, Beasley put in a request for vacation time to be taken in mid-June. Sometime in the fall of 1986, Beasley began a religious toy business in her free time, and she sought the vacation time in order to go to a religious toy convention. Harrigan rejected the request, citing the fact that Beasley had been gone for six of the last nine months on leave and needed more time in her new unit to establish her supervisory role. Harrigan told Beasley that she would consider giving Beasley vacation time after July 1, 1987.

In May 1987, an employee named Mary Ann Caldwell reviewed the data that Beasley's unit had entered into the computer in December 1986 and found serious errors in the calculations. ⁵ On May 13, 1987, Caldwell wrote a memo to Bartels to inform him of the errors. The payment levels had to be recalculated at substantial cost to Blue Cross. It was this error that allegedly led to Beasley's termination on May 13. Beasley claimed at trial that the errors were not discovered until May 19 or 20. The court, however, found that these latter dates represented the dates when corrected data was furnished as input, rather than the date when the errors were discovered.

In her suit, Beasley alleged that Blue Cross had violated Title VII (1) by firing her on account of her religion; (2) by tolerating a religiously hostile work environment; and (3) by failing to accommodate her religious beliefs. After a bench trial, the district court entered judgment for Blue Cross, holding that Beasley had failed to demonstrate that Blue Cross fired her because of her religion. Instead, the court concluded, Blue Cross fired Beasley because of her poor work performance. In addition, the judge concluded that Beasley's harassment claims were unfounded either because the alleged conduct did not constitute harassment, or because (even if it could be so characterized) the conduct did not rise to the level of a Title VII violation. Finally, the judge rejected Beasley's arguments that Blue Cross failed to accommodate her religious beliefs by refusing her request for vacation time or by subjecting her to the supervisor training seminar. The court concluded that Beasley's vacation request was motivated by her...