Patino v. Birken Mfg. Co.

• Decision Date: 15 May 2012
• Docket Number: No. 18441.,18441.
• Citation: 115 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 112,304 Conn. 679,41 A.3d 1013
• Court: Connecticut Supreme Court
• Parties: Luis PATINO v. BIRKEN MANUFACTURING COMPANY.

115 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 112

304 Conn. 679

41 A.3d 1013

Luis PATINO

v.BIRKEN MANUFACTURING COMPANY.

No. 18441.

Supreme Court of Connecticut.

Argued Jan. 31, 2012.Decided May 15, 2012.

Peter D. Vodola, with whom were Elizabeth F. Ahlstrand and, on the brief, Mark B. Seiger, West Hartford, for the appellant (defendant).

Jon L. Schoenhorn, Hartford, with whom, on the brief, was Sara J. Packman, for the appellee (plaintiff).

Thomas W. Ude, Jr., filed a brief for the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., et al., as amici curiae.Nina T. Pirrotti and Bennett H. Klein, pro hac vice, filed a brief for the Connecticut Employment Lawyers Association et al. as amici curiae.Charles Krich, principal attorney, and Derek Borchardt, law student intern, filed a brief for the commission on human rights and opportunities as amicus curiae.ROGERS, C.J., and NORCOTT, ZARELLA, McLACHLAN, EVELEIGH and HARPER, Js.^*ROGERS, C.J.

The central issue presented by this appeal ¹ is whether General Statutes § 46a–81c (1) ² imposes liability on employers for failing to take reasonable steps to prevent their employees from being subjected to hostile work environments based on their sexual orientation. The plaintiff, Luis Patino, commenced this action against the defendant, his former employer, Birken Manufacturing Company, claiming that it engaged in a discriminatory employment practice when it permitted his coworkers to harass him based on his sexual orientation over a period of many years. ³ Following a jury trial, the jury returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff. The defendant then filed a motion to set aside the verdict and a motion for remittitur, both of which the trial court denied. The trial court thereafter rendered judgment in accordance with the verdict, from which the defendant appeals, claiming that: (1) § 46a–81c (1) does not provide for hostile work environment claims; (2) even if we were to assume that such claims can be brought under § 46a–81c (1), the plaintiff presented insufficient evidence to support the jury's finding of a hostile work environment; and (3) the award of damages was unsupported by the evidence and excessive. For the reasons that follow, we reject each of the defendant's claims. Accordingly, we affirm the judgment of the trial court.

The jury reasonably could have found the following facts. The plaintiff was employed by the defendant as a machinist from 1977 until his termination on November 8, 2004.⁴ Beginning in 1991, the plaintiff became the subject of name-calling on the shop floor of the defendant's industrial plant. The name-calling consisted of derogatory slurs for homosexuals in Spanish, such as “pato” and “maricon,” and in Italian and English, such as “pira,” “faggot,” and “homo.” The slurs were used in a variety of contexts, including “faggot go home” and “faggot get out of here.” The plaintiff heard such words “very often,” sometimes even “two or three times a day.” The derogatory words were not spoken to the plaintiff's face, but were made in his presence, such as directly behind his back while he was operating machinery. The plaintiff was devastated and “overwhelmed by anger and by frustration and the humiliation” resulting from the harassment. He testified that the demeaning treatment made him so upset that his body would shake, his work product suffered, and it became difficult for him to sleep.

Initially, in an effort to avoid confrontation, the plaintiff simply recorded the incidents in a series of diaries ⁵ and did not complain to the defendant about the harassment. After a period of five to six years, however, the plaintiff eventually complained to his supervisor, George Kemzura, who responded by holding a meeting with the plaintiff, the employees engaging in the harassment, and the company's owner. At the meeting, the owner indicated that “ ‘bad words' ” were being said, and that they were “ ‘going to stop.’ ” After a few weeks of relief, the harassment recommenced, and the plaintiff again complained to Kemzura, who then transferred one of the offenders to a different facility. The transfer did not solve the problem, however, and soon other coworkers had “ ‘join[ed] in the brouhaha,’ ” and began yelling more slurs in the plaintiff's presence.

In 1995, the plaintiff retained an attorney, who sent a letter to the defendant complaining about the harassment. Gary Greenberg, the defendant's then vice president and general counsel, responded in a letter dated April 20, 1995. In that letter, Greenberg recommended that the plaintiff be evaluated by a psychologist because the plaintiff's job required him to work with precision instruments and he thus posed a safety risk to others when his mental facilities were compromised. Meanwhile, the plaintiff continued to be subjected to harassment and to record the incidents in his diaries.

The plaintiff filed a total of five complaints with the commission on human rights and opportunities (commission), the first of which was filed on September 30, 1996. Following a hearing with the commission, the plaintiff wrote a second letter to the defendant describing the harassment he had experienced up to that point. On September 9, 1997, Greenberg again responded with a letter stating that the defendant had completed an investigation of the plaintiff's complaints and found that none of the plaintiff's coworkers knew anything about the alleged occurrences. On September 16, 1997,⁶ the plaintiff sent the defendant another letter stating that he would not continue sending letters to the defendant describing the incidents because doing so would be “ ‘an exercise in futility.’ ”

The parties thereafter settled the plaintiff's first complaint with the commission by agreeing that the defendant would hold a workplace harassment seminar in November, 1997. At the seminar, employees were informed that they could lose their jobs, be suspended, or even be sued by the defendant if they made derogatory remarks. Few of the employees engaging in the harassment attended the seminar, however, and the harassment did not cease.

The plaintiff filed his second complaint with the commission in 1998, but summarily withdrew it in an attempt to “improv[e] the atmosphere of the shop.” The plaintiff then wrote three more letters to the defendant describing yet more harassment and the detrimental effect that the harassment was having on the plaintiff's work product.⁷ On October 7, 1999, after being informed that the defendant had discussed the matter with the plaintiff's coworkers but had ultimately ended the investigation, the plaintiff filed a third complaint with the commission. The plaintiff then filed a fourth complaint with the commission on March 8, 2002, in which he described fifteen more incidents of harassment. Six months later, still having obtained no relief, the plaintiff wrote another letter to the defendant, dated August 25, 2003.⁸

In January, 2004, five months after sending his last letter to the defendant, the plaintiff filed a fifth complaint with the commission, which is the subject of the present action.⁹ The complaint alleged that the defendant had violated § 46a–81c (1) “by creating a hostile work environment because of the plaintiff's sexual orientation, [and] failing to take adequate measures to alleviate the harassment or to remedy the hostile work environment....” The defendant responded by filing a general denial of the plaintiff's allegations.

Following a jury trial, the jury found in favor of the plaintiff and awarded him $94,500 in noneconomic damages. The defendant filed two postjudgment motions: a motion to set aside the verdict and a motion for remittitur. The trial court denied the motions, concluding that: (1) although § 46a–81c (1) contains no provision explicitly creating hostile work environment claims, “the statute prohibits discrimination ‘in terms, conditions or privileges of employment,’ which ... is an ‘expansive concept’ that authorizes [such claims]”; (2) the plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to support the finding that a hostile work environment existed and the award of damages; and (3) the damages award was not excessive and fell “within the necessarily uncertain limits of fair and just damages ... and [was] proportional to compensatory damages awarded in [similar] cases.” (Citation omitted; internal quotation marks omitted.) This appeal followed. ¹⁰

I

The defendant first claims that the trial court improperly denied its motion to set aside the verdict by concluding that § 46a–81c (1) creates a cause of action for hostile work environment claims. The defendant essentially contends that, because the statute does not contain the words “hostile workplace” or “hostile environment,” the text of the statute plainly and unambiguously indicates that there is no such cause of action. The plaintiff responds that the “terms and conditions” language of § 46a–81c (1) has acquired a peculiar and appropriate definition in the context of antidiscrimination law that “leaves little room for doubt concerning its meaning.” In the alternative, the plaintiff and certain of the amici curiae ¹¹ assert that, even if ambiguous, extratextual evidence demonstrates that the legislature intended to create a hostile work environment cause of action under § 46a–81c (1). We agree with the plaintiff, and conclude that, because the phrase “terms, conditions or privileges of employment” is a well settled term of art in antidiscrimination law, hostile work environment claims fall within the purview of § 46a–81c (1).

As a preliminary matter, we set forth the applicable standard of review. Although we generally review a trial court's denial of a motion to set aside a verdict for an abuse of discretion; Hall v. Bergman, 296 Conn. 169, 179, 994 A.2d 666 (2010); the question whether § 46a–81c (1) provides relief for hostile work environment claims is a question of statutory interpretation over which our review is plenary. See In re...