After being sacked for refusing to take part in a programme that discriminates against white male employees, a former employee of a sizable food service organisation is suing the company in federal court.
From her home office in San Diego, California, Courtney Rogers worked for Compass Group USA Inc., a company based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
According to the company’s LinkedIn site, it had more than 280,000 employees and generated $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019. One of the biggest employers in the world, the business employs thousands of people in California and counts the Dodger Stadium, the San Francisco International Airport, Uber, Snapchat, Netflix, Disney Studios, and NBC Universal among its clients.
The business has received praise for encouraging so-called diversity, and from 2018 through 2022, it was included on Forbes’ list of the Best Employers for Diversity.
Compass Group PLC, a company established in the United Kingdom, generated $32.2 billion in revenue in 2019.
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Employed in August 2021, Ms. Rogers was given the position “Recruiter, Internal Mobility Team.”
She was in charge of handling internal promotions, which involved posting job listings, reviewing applications, holding interviews, writing and sending offer letters, conducting background checks, ordering drug tests, starting and overseeing onboarding, and making sure that personnel updates were reflected in the system.
According to the civil complaint in Rogers v. Compass Group USA Inc., Compass established a programme it named “Operation Equity” in March 2022, a supposedly diverse programme that gave qualified employees specialised training, mentorship, and the prospect of a promotion upon graduation.
The Thomas More Society, a global public interest law firm with a Chicago headquarters that coordinated the legal action, filed the lawsuit on July 24 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
The programme, however, was only open to “women and people of colour.” White men were not permitted to take part and profit from the associated training, mentoring, and promotion guarantees.
The company “used a euphemistic and false title to conceal the true nature of the programme” by dubbing it “Operation Equity.” According to the court complaint, the programme is more appropriately known as the “White-Men-Need-Not-Apply” programme since it is an illustration of “outright racial balancing,” which is obviously illegal, and is the kind of programme “promoted by people… who harbour racial animus against white men.”