CVS Pharmacy recently lost a motion to dismiss a case alleging a hostile work environment caused by: (1) directions to use racial profiling against black and Hispanic store customers; and (2) an alleged barrage of racial slurs in the workplace.
In denying CVS Pharmacy’s motion, the court focused, in part, on the fact that a reasonable jury could find that CVS Pharmacy failed to adhere to its own Employee Handbook and Code of Conduct (“CVS Handbook”) and possibly mishandled calls to its ethics hotline.
The CVS Handbook prohibits discrimination against CVS employees and customers on the basis of race and color (among other things). CVS Pharmacy provides a copy of its CVS Handbook to its employees when they are hired and makes the CVS Handbook available on the company’s internal intranet portal.
In the event of discrimination, the CVS Handbook states that employees are “expected to report incidents of inappropriate behavior, unlawful discrimination, workplace violence, and workplace or sexual harassment as soon as possible after they occur.” The CVS Handbooks describes a number of ways to report unlawful discrimination, including notifying employees that they may call the CVS Caremark Ethics Line at any time.
In seeking to have the case dismissed, CVS Pharmacy alleged that it had no record of a compliant of race discrimination from either of the two plaintiffs in the case. Nonetheless, one of the plaintiffs testified that he called the ethics hotline on several occasions to report incidents of racial discrimination. CVS Pharmacy’s records reflect that the plaintiff called the ethics hotline, however, CVS denied that the plaintiff’s reports to the ethics hotline included complaints of race discrimination. The court found that the plaintiff’s testimony, that his complaints to the ethics hotline were ignored, raises questions regarding whether the hotline was a viable means of reporting racial discrimination. The court further found that there was sufficient evidence to conclude that the protocol for handling discrimination complaints, as outlined in the CVS Handbook, was not followed by supervisors and that the written policy was thus “window dressing.” In other words, there was a genuine issue of fact as to whether CVS’ policy had force.
The other plaintiff in the case, never called the CVS ethics hotline to report discrimination during her employment, but testified that she did call the hotline after her employment ended.
The plaintiffs asserted a theory that CVS has poor record keeping. The court found this theory to be bolstered by several pieces of evidence, including the second plaintiff’s testimony that she called the hotline after her termination– a call for which CVS has no record–and evidence showing that CVS does not consistently document complaints of racial discrimination or escalate such complaints up the reporting chain, as required by the CVS Handbook. In sum, the court concluded that “a reasonable jury could clearly find that CVS negligently ignored the complaints of racial discrimination by the plaintiffs.”
Although this case has yet to be resolved, the court’s opinion makes it clear that corporations must follow their own internal policies and carefully track and respond to calls to their ethics hotlines.
See Zaire Lamarr-Arruz & Mominna Ansoralli v. Cvs Pharm., 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 157843 (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, September 26 ,2017).
Just Ethics & Chill 