Huang v. Cont'l Cas. Co.

• Decision Date: 13 June 2014
• Docket Number: No. 12–1300.,12–1300.
• Parties: Eric HUANG, Plaintiff–Appellant, v. CONTINENTAL CASUALTY COMPANY, Defendant–Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

754 F.3d 447

Eric HUANG, Plaintiff–Appellant,

v.CONTINENTAL CASUALTY COMPANY, Defendant–Appellee.

No. 12–1300.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Dec. 6, 2012.

Decided June 13, 2014.

Michael T. Smith, Attorney, Roselle, IL, for Plaintiff–Appellant.

John Wesley Drury, Attorney, Richard B. Lapp, Attorney, Seyfarth Shaw LLP, Chicago, IL, for Defendant–Appellee.

Before FLAUM, EASTERBROOK, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

ROVNER, Circuit Judge.

Eric Huang, a former systems and software engineer, appeals the grant of summary judgment against him in this employment-discrimination action. He principally asserts that, by firing him, Continental Casualty Company discriminated against him because he is Chinese and retaliated against him for complaining about workplace issues. (The parties refer to Continental as “CNA,” Continental's parent corporation; for consistency, we follow their convention in this opinion.) Because the undisputed evidence shows that Continental lawfully fired Huang because he refused to accept legitimate work assignments, we affirm the district court's judgment.

The events that precipitated this lawsuit largely began in 2007. At that time, Huang had been working for CNA, a provider of commercial insurance products, for eight years. In March, Huang's supervisor transferred him to a new, four-member team with different job duties. CNA required every member of Huang's four-person team to be on “pager duty” every fourth weekend. Pager duty entailed carrying a pager at home and being available to respond to it 24 hours a day throughout the assigned weekend.

Beginning in August 2007, Huang repeatedly refused to work the weekend hours that CNA assigned him for pager duty, citing family obligations. He persisted in his refusal even after his supervisor and human resources reminded him that pager duty is a work requirement, equally shared by all team members, and told him that CNA could fire him for refusing it. Huang offered to work from the office on Sundays in exchange for having Mondays off but refused to carry a pager and remain on call while at home during the weekends.

Around this time, Huang made a workplace complaint. Huang's supervisor had told him, for reasons unrelated to his refusal to comply with pager duty, that Huang was “pissing [him] off.” In response, Huang emailed the human resources department to complain about the comment. (Two years earlier, Huang had also complained to human resources about another supervisor's “favoritism” toward some co-workers, but the nature of the complaint is not in the record.)

In December 2007, four months after first refusing to comply with the on-call directive, Huang's supervisor and a human resources agent met with him and gave him one final opportunity to commit to a weekend, work-from-home schedule. They again warned him that CNA would fire him if he did not comply with the weekend-hours job requirement. When he again refused, CNA followed through and discharged him.

In compliance with CNA's practice following termination of employment, its human resources agent asked Huang for a list of his belongings so that someone could retrieve them from his desk. When Huang refused to provide the list and demanded to be let back to his work station, human resources called a security guard. Police officers eventually escorted Huang out of the building and arrested him, although CNA did not press charges.

After pursuing his administrative remedies, Huang filed this suit. Only two of his claims are relevant to this appeal. First, he contends that the company discriminated against him based on his race and national origin by firing him, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e–2000e–17. Second, he argues that by firing him and having him arrested, CNA unlawfully retaliated against him for his earlier complaints about supervisors. He relies only on the indirect method of proving these claims.

The district court granted CNA's motion for summary judgment. The court determined that, because he ignored pager duty, Huang did not provide evidence that he had met the company's legitimate job expectations. In reaching this conclusion, the court rejected Huang's argument that, because the pager-duty requirement was not included in his job description, it was not a legitimate requirement. The district court also distinguished two employees that Huang cited as similarly situated, explaining that neither refused to work from home on weekends. Finally, Huang's retaliation claims failed, the court reasoned, because he did not supply evidence that he had engaged in the protected activity of complaining about unlawful discrimination.

We review the district court's grant of summary judgment de novo, examining the record in the light most favorable to Huang and construing all reasonable inferences from the evidence in his favor. See, e.g., Naficy v. Ill. Dep't of Human Servs., 697 F.3d 504, 509 (7th Cir.2012). Both Title VII and § 1981 forbid an employer from firing an employee on account of his race or national origin, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–2 (Title VII); Andonissamy v. Hewlett–Packard Co., 547 F.3d 841, 849–50 (7th Cir.2008) (§ 1981), and retaliating against an employee who protests unlawful employment discrimination, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e–3(a) (Title VII); CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, 553 U.S. 442, 451, 128 S.Ct. 1951, 170 L.Ed.2d 864 (2008) (§ 1981).

We begin our analysis with Huang's discrimination claim. On appeal, Huang argues that he supplied evidence of a prima facie case of race discrimination under the indirect method. To establish a prima facie case of discrimination under either Title VII or § 1981, Huang needed to provide evidence that (1) he is a member of a protected class; (2) he was meeting his employer's legitimate performance expectations; (3) he suffered an adverse employment action; and (4) other similarly-situated, non-Chinese (or non-Asian) employees were treated more favorably. See Montgomery v. Am. Airlines, Inc., 626 F.3d 382, 389, 394 (7th Cir.2010); Hobbs v. City of Chicago, 573 F.3d 454, 460 n. 1 (7th Cir.2009); Antonetti v. Abbott Labs., 563 F.3d 587, 591 n. 4 (7th Cir.2009). If he fails to provide evidence of any one of these factors, his claim fails. Montgomery, 626 F.3d at 394.

Only the second and fourth elements of the prima facie case are at issue on appeal, but because Huang contends that CNA enforced its job expectations unequally, these two elements merge. See Peele v. County Mut. Ins. Co., 288 F.3d 319, 329 (7th Cir.2002). Huang contends that for three reasons he presented sufficient evidence that he met CNA's legitimate expectations. First, he contends that he offered the company a suitable alternative to the weekend pager-duty requirement by proposing to come into work on Sundays instead of Mondays. Second, he argues that he had good reason for refusing pager-duty: he wanted more time with his family. Third, he maintains that pager duty was not legitimate because it was not written in his job description.

All three of Huang's arguments are meritless. First,...