The Honorable Richard McDermott

Note for Hearing with Oral Arguments

Friday, January 18^th, 2002 at 9:00AM

 

 

IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON

FOR KING COUNTY

 

 

LARRY PITTMAN, et al,                                     Plaintiffs,                         vs. KINGS’S COMMAND FOODS, INC., a corporation registered in the State of Washington,                                     Defendant

No. 99-2-52345-8 KNT DECLARATION OF SIDNEY LANIER IN RESPONSE TO  DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT TO DISMISS  PLAINTIFFS MICHAEL DAVIS, YOLANDA ESKRIDGE, JOE DONKOR AND SIDNEY LANIER Note for Hearing with Oral Arguments Friday, January 18th, 2002 at 9:00AM

 

            I, Sidney Lanier, declare:

            I have read the Motion for Summary Judgment which requests to remove me as a plaintiff.  I disagree on several points and will clarify.

            Defendants claim that Shawna Flowers was my supervisor in red meats.  This is not true.  She did not work in red meats or multi-vac when I was placed in red meats.  She worked in the packing room on night shift and then she came to the day shift to multi-vac, but this was after I had been in red meats for two or three months.  So I was in red meats before Shawna and before the multi-vac supervisor position became open.  It is not true that I did not have supervisory experience.  I was a supervisor at the sanitation company in North Carolina.

            They state that I was relieved to be fired.  This is not true.  And I filed for unemployment and Employment Security found that King’s Command wrongfully terminated me and therefore I was eligible for unemployment.

            I was told I was going to work in the freezer.  After 30 days I had been in the freezer, they hired someone Caucasian and put me back on the floor.  This was someone who had less experience and was from Interim, as I was, and I should have been given that position as they promised.  They gave me no reason.  Sometimes they would post positions, and if all blacks applied, they would take the notification down and then put it up in about a week and they would keep doing that until they would only get white applicants.  Everyone in the plant knew about this.

            Kirk McCoy and Terry Smith told me I would be promoted to machine operator.  They kept training me.  I ran the machines by myself sometimes.  There was a lot of animosity from Robert and Alan while I worked there.  Kirk didn’t talk to Alan about training Sidney and making sure that they knew Sidney would be there.  They said “Sidney, you’re going to be running the fry line because we’re having problems with Alan”.  I said fine.  Eventually I got tired of them moving me back and forth and not permanently putting me in that position.  They just used me as a pawn while they straightened out their relationship with Alan and then they didn’t need me anymore.  I feel that this is racial.  They just kept me working there until they found a Caucasian they wanted.  They had done the same thing in the freezer.

            Don Furtick, a white co-worker, used to call me dumb, stupid black ass mother  fucker.  I went to Kirk McCoy and Terry Smith about this.  I wanted it to stop.  They didn’t do anything about it.  They  thought it was funny. They did nothing about it and it continued.

            Kirk McCoy would come up to me and say things like “You’re stupid.  I’m not going to pay you the rate of pay for this job.”  He would be referring to a position I was already in, stating that I should be paid less for my work.

             I feel that if it weren’t for my skin color, I would have been a machine operator.  There was only one black machine operator—Darrell Cody.  And he had been there a long time and knew how to put up with them.  The only reason Greg Cody was a lead grinder was because of Darrell. They wanted someone “big, black, and strong” and no one else wanted that job.

The  Defendant states that we didn’t complain to management.  Management was the problem.  We couldn’t go to them and the union didn’t do anything.  When they say I didn’t grieve, this is not accurate.  Anytime we went to the union with a racial complaint, the union didn’t have us fill out formal papers.  They always said they would investigate and then nothing ever happened.  I always felt that the union was a part of management, not a tool for the employees.

            There was an atmosphere of racial tension.  There were several of us who weren’t happy about this and there wasn’t anyone in management who was African-American, so there wasn’t much we could do about it.  The racial tension came as a result of management’s manor of talking to us.  There was verbal abuse.  There was physical abuse specifically directed toward African-Americans.  I complained to my union rep about this—Darrell Cody.  We talked several times about this.  I don’t know what Darrell did with the union, but this was the procedure that was required.

            I observed that they gave the blacks the heavy and dirty jobs and they gave whites the better jobs.  For example, Keith Kern and I had to be there earlier in the morning to get things ready to assist the grinders.  After the Caucasian grinders didn’t need me anymore, they told me to go on my way and do what other jobs I had to do, but they didn’t help me.  It was Kirk McCoy who had Keith and I show up early to do this.  And when the  waste baskets needed emptying, they had me or Larry Pittman empty the trash.  The white guys never emptied their own trash.  As a matter of fact, the white guys could throw paper on the floor and they would make us black guys pick it up.  Kirk on many occasions made it a point for Keith, Larry or I to do other people’s (Caucasians) work—like servants.

            I remember one incident when Don Furtick asked Larry Pittman to dump the trash.  Larry Pittman told him to wait until he was finished with something and he’d be back.  Furtick pulled the trash outside next to the dumpster and dumped the trash all over the ground and told Larry Pittman to get his black ass out there and pick it up.  Yes it was Larry’s job to throw away the trash, but to dump the trash on the ground right next to the dumpster and make a black person pick it up is racial abuse.  Larry Pittman went to the office and complained about it to management and management told him to pick it up, it was his job.

            Another racial form of abuse was how, on many occasions a white lady would pull up out front with boxes in her car and the Kirk or Terry would go into the lunch room and pick out a black like me or lady and say “get out there and carry her boxes”.  They singled out black men to be servants like this and they would do this while we were on our breaks instead of using someone who was on the clock.

            There was discrimination in the occurrence policy.  For example, the lead meat cutter, Elliott Stevens, a Caucasian, before he quit told me he had been there a long time and that he knew people upstairs and that he didn’t have to worry about his job.  He didn’t get written up for occurrences.

 

            There was an incident when Kirk McCoy picked me up by my neck and threw me against the wall.  He said he was getting tired of putting up with me.  I told this to Larry, to Roy.  This was by the Q.C. office.  I was in shock.  He had a habit of playing with me and Larry—pushing us.  He and Robert would double team us.   We were their private punching bags.  We knew if we fought back, we would be terminated.   There as verbal abuse that went along with this.  They joked:  What’s state is near Oregon.  The answer was Idaho.  Like I’m the ho.  And then they’d say I’m the pimp.  This was Kirk McCoy’s joke that he liked to do with African-Americans. Also, Kirk McCoy would say “I’m getting ready to go to the bathroom and do a Sid”—meaning he was going to take a shit and I’m the same color as shit.  They probably did the same thing to Keith.  I believe their actions were very racially motivated.

            If their actions weren’t racially motivated, then why didn’t some African American end up in management.  Why didn’t they do this same type of thing to white guys.  This is why the suit was started in the first place. 

            I swear under the penalties of perjury that the foregoing statement is true and correct under the laws of the State of Washington.

 

                                                                        __________________________________

                                                                        Sidney Lanier, plaintiff

 

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