Smith v. Allen Health Systems, Inc.

• Decision Date: 11 September 2002
• Docket Number: No. 01-2821.,01-2821.
• Citation: 302 F.3d 827
• Parties: Candis SMITH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ALLEN HEALTH SYSTEMS, INC.; Allen Memorial Hospital Corporation; The Memorial Foundation of Allen Hospital; Kenneth Leibold; Robert Justis; Richard Seidler, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eighth Circuit

302 F.3d 827

Candis SMITH, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. ALLEN HEALTH SYSTEMS, INC.; Allen Memorial Hospital Corporation; The Memorial Foundation of Allen Hospital; Kenneth Leibold; Robert Justis; Richard Seidler, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 01-2821.

United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: March 15, 2002.

Filed: September 11, 2002.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Vernon P. Squires, argued, Cedar Rapids, IA (Ellen R. Ramsey-Kacena, on the brief), for appellant.

James R. Hellman, argued, Waterloo, IA (Lynn M. Smith, on the brief), for appellee.

Before HANSEN, Chief Judge, JOHN R. GIBSON, Circuit Judge, and GOLDBERG,¹ Judge.

JOHN R. GIBSON, Circuit Judge.

Candis Smith appeals the district court's² entry of summary judgment against her and in favor of her employer, The Memorial Foundation of Allen Hospital, and related defendants³ on her claim that Allen fired her in retaliation for taking leave to adopt a child and for complaining about the Hospital's hiring practices. She claimed Allen's termination of her employment violated the Family and Medical Leave Act, 29 U.S.C. § 2615 (2000), Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-3 (1994), the Iowa Civil Rights Act, Iowa Code § 216.6 (2000), and that it was a breach of contract. Allen responded that it fired Smith for failure to perform a crucial function of her job — sending out receipts to donors who contributed to the Allen Foundation. The Magistrate Judge held that there was no evidence that Allen's proffered reason for firing Smith was pretextual. Moreover, he found that the employee handbook and policy on which Smith based her contract claim did not in fact form a contract, nor did Allen violate the provisions of those documents. Accordingly, he entered summary judgment for Allen. On appeal Smith contends that there was evidence of pretext and that Allen breached a contractual duty to her. We affirm.

Smith worked for the Foundation from 1985 to 1999. The Foundation is the fund-raising arm of Allen Memorial Hospital. Smith's job title changed from development secretary to administrative secretary, but the duties of her job always included promptly acknowledging contributions to the Foundation with a receipt and thank you letter. Smith's written job description as administrative secretary included the requirement that she "acknowledge each donation with a thank-you card and a receipt daily." She agreed at her deposition that it was her understanding that these tasks were to be performed daily, except that in a "crisis," she might be allowed to catch up "on the next day or so." Also at her deposition, Smith agreed that she understood the importance to a charitable organization of thanking donors and getting tax receipts out to them. She admitted that in the second week of December 1998, Robert Justis, the Executive Director of the Foundation, told her that he had received complaints from donors that they had not received acknowledgments. Smith said she told Justis that she "would try to get them [the acknowledgments] out as quickly as possible," but they did not discuss how far behind she was.

Smith was involved in a religious ministry through which she helped Bosnian immigrants who had settled in Iowa. Beginning in 1997, she helped Bosnians apply for jobs at Allen Hospital, but the Hospital did not hire any of the people Smith knew. In the fall of 1998, Smith asked Kenneth Leibold, the Hospital's Human Resources Director, if national origin discrimination could be the reason for the Hospital's failure to hire the Bosnians. Leibold said no, and the two of them never talked about the subject again.

On January 1, 1999, Smith took family leave so that she could go to Romania to adopt a child. The day before she went on leave, Smith took a stack of donor receipts that needed to be mailed out, put them on a chair in her office, and left a note for another employee, Jenny Garrison, asking her to type thank you notes and mail the notes and receipts while Smith was on leave. Smith said she "may have mentioned to [Garrison] that I would appreciate her getting those out in the first couple days because of the tax reasons," but she did not tell Garrison that it was urgent. Smith also testified that she mentioned to Justis that "there were probably going to be a few things I had not completed" before going on leave.

On January 6, 1999, while Smith was in Romania, another employee, Matt Rolinger, found a stack of receipts in Smith's work area. The receipts went back to November 4, 1998 and represented more than 400 donations worth more than $350,000. One unacknowledged donation was for a contribution worth $136,000 from the donor who had complained back in November about not getting a receipt. Justis and Seidler decided to discharge Smith. When Smith got back from Romania, Justis called her in for a meeting to take place on January 14, 1999. At the meeting, Justis told Smith that her employment was being terminated because of her failure to send out the receipts.⁴

Smith sued on the theories that Allen had terminated her in retaliation for exercising her right to take family leave and for complaining about Allen's failure to hire Bosnians, which Smith characterized as religious discrimination. She also claimed that Allen's Associate's Handbook and Standard Operating Procedure for employee discipline constituted a contract between Allen and her, and that Allen breached that contract by terminating her employment without proceeding through the progressive discipline steps described in those two documents.

Allen responded that it had terminated Smith's employment because she failed to send receipts to its donors. It also denied that the Associate's Handbook or Standard Operating Procedure formed a contract or that it had violated the terms of those documents. It noted that both the handbook and the operating procedure permitted Allen to discharge an employee without progressing through disciplinary steps.

I.

Smith argues that her Family and Medical Leave Act retaliation claim should have survived summary judgment because she has discredited Allen's proffered reasons for discharging her.

We review the district court's grant of summary judgment de novo. Darby v. Bratch, 287 F.3d 673, 678 (8th Cir.2002). We must affirm if, viewing the record in the light most favorable to Smith, there are no genuine issues of material fact and Allen is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Id.; Fed.R.Civ.P. 56(c).

The Leave Act provides eligible employees up to twelve work-weeks of unpaid leave in any twelve-month period and prohibits employers from discriminating against employees for exercising their rights under the Act. 29 U.S.C. §§ 2612, 2615(a)(2) (2000). Basing an adverse employment action on an employee's use of leave, or in other words, retaliation for exercise of Leave Act rights, is therefore actionable. See Darby, 287 F.3d at 679. An employee can prove Leave Act retaliation circumstantially, using a variant of the McDonnell Douglas⁵ method of proof. To establish a prima facie case of retaliation, Smith must show that she exercised rights afforded by the Act, that she suffered an adverse employment action, and that there was a causal connection between her exercise of rights and the adverse employment action. Darby, 287 F.3d at 679. It is undisputed that Smith took leave to adopt a child and that she was discharged. There is, however, some question about whether Smith established a causal connection between her taking leave and her firing.

At her deposition, Allen's lawyer asked Smith to state the basis for her claim that Allen retaliated against her. She replied simply: "Because I was on family leave at the time that this termination was done." Counsel asked if there was any other basis for her claim, and she said: "No, just the time frame."

We have discounted, albeit with qualification, the possibility that mere temporal proximity between protected act and adverse employment action can establish the necessary causal connection: "Generally, more than a temporal connection between the protected conduct and the adverse employment action is required to present a genuine factual issue on retaliation." Kiel v. Select Artificials, Inc., 169 F.3d 1131, 1136 (8th Cir.1999) (en banc). A pattern of adverse actions that occur just after protected activity can supply the extra quantum of evidence to satisfy the causation requirement. See Bassett v. City of Minneapolis, 211 F.3d 1097, 1105-06 (8th Cir.2000) (extensive pattern of protected activity followed by disciplinary measures established causation); Hudson v. Norris, 227 F.3d 1047, 1051 (8th Cir. 2000) (large number of adverse actions within four months of protected activity, plus evidence of pretext, established causation). But even without a pattern, we have sometimes held that the timing of one incident of adverse employment action following protected activity sufficed to establish causal connection, e.g., O'Bryan v. KTIV Television, 64 F.3d 1188, 1193-94 (8th Cir.1995) (three months between filing administrative complaints and firing established causal connection), and we have done this after our en banc decision in Kiel. See Sprenger v. Federal Home Loan Bank, 253 F.3d 1106, 1113-14 (8th Cir. 2001) (temporal proximity sufficient to establish prima facie case of disability discrimination, but not to show pretext); Foster v. Time Warner Entm't Co., 250 F.3d 1189, 1196 (8th Cir.2001) ("Foster established a temporal connection between her requests for accommodating Terry's disability and her termination, permitting an inference of retaliation."). But see Gagnon v. Sprint Corp., 284 F.3d 839, 851, 852 (8th Cir.2002) (one month's time between response to EEOC claim and adverse action did not establish causation), petition for cert. filed (Aug. 19, 2002) (No. 02-273); Kipp v. Missouri Highway and Transp. Comm'n, 280 F.3d 893, 897 (8th Cir.2002) ("[A] `mere coincidence of...