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A Florida plumbing company has settled a federal lawsuit accusing managers of openly displaying Confederate flags and assigning Black and Hispanic workers to "humiliating and degrading" tasks.
According to a complaint filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, J.A. Croson, a plumbing and HVAC company headquartered in Sorrento, will pay $1.6 million to 17 Black and Hispanic former employees who alleged racial harassment and retaliation.
Managers at J.A. Croson regularly hosted team meetings "in view of Confederate flags," the complaint states. They also were accused of giving "favorable" assignments to white employees like plumbing and pipe work while doling out hard manual labor to Black and Hispanic employees.
The EEOC said in a statement that the “distribution of humiliating and degrading assignments” to non-white employees was “based on race and national origin."
In one instance, an employee who objected to the display of the Confederate flag was allegedly “ordered to haul literally hundreds of toilets on his own with no assistance and no motorized tools of any kind from the roof of a building to the first floor." The employee quit in 2021 due to ongoing harassment, the complaint states.
The EEOC also noted in their complaint that two employees who reported harassment were fired. One manager allegedly said the company “decided to ‘get rid of the cancer’” after “people were complaining."
Attorney Gary A. Costales, who represented three former employees in the case, said in a statement that his “clients are hard-working people who had never been involved in a matter as this one.”
“We were fortunate to have the EEOC spring into action in the public interest. We are gratified to have achieved this result,” Costales said.
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