EEOC sues company over firing of female sheet metal workers
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The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued a sheet metal company for allegedly serially firing female sheet metal workers and treating them differently because of their sex.
The agency said Thursday that while working as a subcontractor on the massive John Jay College of Criminal Justice expansion from 2009 through 2011, Cold Harbor, N.Y.-based Vamco Sheet Metals Inc. fired each of the women referred to it by their union for pretextual reasons, some after just a few days of work.
The EEOC also charged that the company discriminated against the women in other ways during their short tenures, from monitoring the length of their bathroom breaks to assigning them menial tasks such as fetching coffee to denying one woman, a new mother, a private place to pump breast milk.
“In industries such as construction where women are still underrepresented, too many employers seem to believe that they're not bound by the same rules as everyone else,” Thomas Lepak, the Los Angeles-based EEOC trial attorney handling the case, said in a statement. “With this case and others, we’re letting them know that they’re held to the same standards as any other company operating in this day and age.”
A company spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
