Housekeeper called co-workers at NC hotel ‘white tree people’ and ‘ho’s,’ lawsuit says
Editor’s note: This story was updated on Sept. 2 to include comment from the hotel owner
Several white housekeepers at a Lake Norman hotel say a Black co-worker went unpunished despite repeatedly calling them “white trash” and other racial insults, according to a civil rights lawsuit by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
When one of the white housekeepers finally complained to the hotel owner, he told her that “he was done with the conversation” and fired her, EEOC lawyers said in the lawsuit.
The commission sided with the women’s claims of a racially hostile workplace, and it wants a jury to order the owner of the Hampton Inn and Suites at Lake Norman in Mooresville to pay them damages, according to the lawsuit filed Aug. 25 in U.S. District Court in Statesville. The fired worker also deserves back pay, according to the commission.
Chris Floyd, whose T.M.F. Mooresville LLC owns the hotel, said the allegations are false
“We are very perplexed with the EEOC’s lawsuit,” Floyd said in a text to The Charlotte Observer Wednesday night. “The documents we produced to the EEOC are actually contrary to the allegations made.”
No employee was fired, he said.
“We worked with these employees to find solutions, but they left,” Floyd said — one for another job who later asked to come back, and another because of a family matter.
“We will show these allegations are false and that we all worked hard to have a safe and healthy work environment for all of our employees, regardless of race,” Floyd said.
The white housekeepers, Rhonda Kendrick, Jennifer Sipes, Candice Sanders and others unnamed in the lawsuit, endured the insults from April 2017 through October 2018, according to the EEOC complaint.
Being called “white bitch”, “white ho (whore)“ and “white trash” by the Black housekeeper was routine, according to the lawsuit, referring to the white employees.
“The Housekeeper routinely and in a hostile and disparaging manner used the term `white tree people’ to refer to Caucasian employees who took breaks under a tree,” EEOC lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. “The Housekeeper did not refer to employees of other races who took their breaks in the same location as ‘tree people.’”
“I can’t believe you are sitting with the white tree people,” the housekeeper chastised fellow Black workers at the hotel on N.C. 150 at Interstate 77 Exit 36, EEOC lawyers wrote in the lawsuit.
The hotel’s general manager, who isn’t named in the lawsuit, heard the Black housekeeper use the “white tree people” reference at least once but did nothing to stop the housekeeper’s use of such racially derogatory words, the EEOC lawyers said.
The Black housekeeper also “sabotaged” the work of the white housekeepers, the lawyers said.
After Kendrick was assigned to a different position, the Black housekeeper stripped the rooms that the housekeeper had been assigned to clean, before Kendrick could, according to the lawsuit. Kendrick changed her schedule “to avoid the Housekeeper’s hostility.”
When Sanders was promoted to room inspector, the Black housekeeper refused to follow her instructions or release the rooms the Black housekeeper had cleaned so Sanders could inspect them, EEOC lawyers said.
The Black housekeeper hid items in cleaned rooms “so others checking Ms. Sanders’ work would find the items and think that Ms. Sanders was not adequately inspecting the rooms,” according to the lawsuit.
In May 2020, the EEOC found that the white workers had been racially harassed, but the agency couldn’t get the owner to agree to terms that would stop the harassment, according to the lawsuit.
Kendrick left the hotel in August 2018.
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 6:30 AM.