In California’s largest race bias cases, Latino workers are accused of abusing Black colleagues. We hear from some victims.
Two of the largest race discrimination cases investigated by the federal government in the past decade allege widespread abuse of hundreds of Black employees by supervisors and coworkers at warehouses in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Anti-black bias on the job is sadly nothing new. But as the Latino population across the US, and especially California continues to grow, anti-Black bias by Latinos in the workplace is drawing renewed scrutiny.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times labor reporter Margot Roosevelt
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In California’s largest race bias cases, Latino workers are accused of abusing Black colleagues
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Fight over jobs divides interests of Blacks, Latinos
Gustavo: Two of the largest race discrimination cases investigated by the federal government in the past decade allege widespread abuse of hundreds of Black employees at warehouses in Southern California’s Inland Empire region.
Anna: The N word … the imagery, the nooses…
Leon: Writing on the walls calling us silverback gorillas.
Regina: I heard the workers call me negra fea, the N-word in Spanish and Aunt Jemima.
Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Arellano, You're listening to The Times, essential news from the LA Times. It's Monday August 22, 2022.
Anti-Black bias on the job is sadly nothing new. But as the Latino population across the United States, and especially California, continues to grow, instances of anti-Black racism by Latinos are starting to happen more, and more.
Gustavo: Margot Roosevelt covers California's economic labor and workplace issues for the Los Angeles Times. Margot, welcome back.
Margot: Thank you, Gustavo.
Gustavo: In this day and age people cite white supremacy as the primary motivator in discrimination, but what's going on between Black and brown warehouse workers in the Inland Empire?
Margot: About half of the imported goods from Asia that Americans buy all across the United States come through the ports of L.A. and Long Beach. And much of them are trucked to warehouses in the Inland Empire. So in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, you have a huge number of low-wage blue-collar jobs. So the EEOC, that's the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, is the federal government's main civil rights agency, and it filed suit against the companies that ran two huge warehouses after hundreds of complaints from Black workers that they were harassed with the N-words and other slurs by fellow workers and discriminated against by their bosses.
These two warehouses were run by giant companies, Ryder Integrated Logistics and Cardinal Health. And a lot of their workers were hired and jointly supervised by an Orange County temp firm, Kimco Staffing Services, and a Glendale temp firm, AppleOne. When I read through the court documents, I was surprised to see Spanish language slurs listed. So I went out to the Inland Empire to interview some of the Black workers who had filed complaints. And they all said the same thing, which was that the abuse and discrimination came from Latino workers and supervisors.
The harassment was really ugly.
Regina: As soon as I started working for the warehouse, I felt unwelcome. Like I wasn't wanted there.
Margot: Regina McCorkle was the first Black worker to file a complaint with EEOC over her treatment at the Ryder Logistics Warehouse.
Regina: Usually people are nice to new employees. But workers ignored me. They stood in groups. They were pointing at me and laughing and talking loudly about me and other employees in Spanish. The workplace was so segregated.
Margot: She told me that she was a temp worker like many of the workers there. And at the end of each shift, their names would be on a list to work the next day.
Regina: Black workers were picked last or not at all. So they were sent home. I needed the work, but I couldn't get the hours when Black employees kept being the last ones chosen, but I hung on. I worked really hard to move up. I thought the work environment was bad before, but it got way worse after I got picked to be a quality auditor. The attitude of the line worker shifted immediately and they began to be openly hostile towards me. Like they just seemed insulted that a Black woman was checking their work. I heard the workers call me Negra Fea, the N word in Spanish, and Aunt Jemima. They called me a pickaninny and referred to me as a Black nanny and threatened me and other Black workers with violence.
Regina: This became so unbearable.
Margot: And Regina complained to at least six Ryder and Kimco managers who were all Latinos about the slurs.
Regina: The manager just told me to get back to work. And the staffing agency told me there was nothing they can do about it. One manager made me confront the woman leading the harassment and said it was just her culture as if I should accept it. At some point, the warehouse employees were told to sign a no-bullying policy, but that just seemed to make the harassment get worse.
Margot: So eventually, after her complaints, she was fired. And the EEOC said she was retaliated against for the fact that she did complain.
Regina: During that year, while this was going on, it hit me hard. My self-esteem took a hit. I felt inadequate. I felt so excited about the chance of a permanent position. On one level I was told I was doing great, that I was gonna be promoted. I felt that if I kept going and kept grinding, that I would be protected because I was an asset to the company, but that didn't happen. And that's when I was fired.
Gustavo: Wow. That’s really sad. What were some of the other stories you heard from Black workers who were inside these warehouses?
Margot: So Benjamin Watkins worked four years at the Ryder Logistics warehouse. And he said Hispanic workers had their own production lines and the Black workers had to be on a different line.
Benjamin: One time, an older female worker called to me, “Hey monkey, yeah you,” and waved a banana at me. She did that in the break room while everybody was watching. A group of women burst out laughing. I tried to respond to her and she just pretended to not understand English. That was in front of all these workers. After years, I couldn't work there anymore.
Margot: So there was basically segregation.
Benjamin: The Black workers also were doing the heaviest or the hard manual labor, heavy lifting. And the non-Black workers were doing the lights, easy work, light work. We were working these long hours and, sweating and the supervisors wouldn't let the Black workers get water or take bathroom breaks. We had to wait. They said you're big and Black, you can keep working.
Margot: One of the workers I spoke to was Leon Simmons.
Leon: I grew up in a different era, in the ’60s. But even I never experienced racism like that, where someone would just say the N-word to your face.
Margot: Leon Simmons grew up in Compton. He had Mexican-American friends and he couldn't believe when he got to this warehouse that he was hearing what he was hearing from his Latino coworkers.
Leon: This whole thing, it really affected me. Every time, even talking about it now affects me. You get emotional. You get angry. You don't want to have to confront people about this. I was always thinking I'm gonna lose my job if I say too much.
Margot: He was supposedly hired to drive a cherry picker. But those vehicles were given to Latino workers and Black workers who, even when they had certifications, were kept off of the cherry pickers and were made to be floor pickers, which paid less and was much more difficult a job. And one of the things that Leon told me was that the Black workers were forced to work overtime, like up to 14 and 16 hours a day, but the Latino workers were allowed to go home after their regular shift, which is eight to 10 hours.
Leon: You're a temp, you know, they always throw that in your face. So if they, you know, they work us 13, 14 hours and you’re tired, and you complain, “Man, can I leave now?” You know, “Well, you can leave if you want to. But you might not get called back tomorrow.”
Margot: And he said after his shift, the Latino supervisors would make him clean up the trash while everybody else was said home.
Leon: They did that all the time.
Margot: The slurs that Leon experienced just completely, he said, messed him up.
Leon: Every day, when I go in the bathroom, there's racist graffiti almost every day in there. Someone wrote “N-word stink,” “Go back to Africa” and also writing on the walls calling us silverback gorillas. The other Black workers would also notice the graffiti. And we would go in there and cross it out with a marker.
Leon: And two days later it would be right back. We went and complained to the supervisors, take 'em in there. They would see it too. They used the same restrooms as we did, and it really made me upset. One time I came out of the restroom and asked a group of people who did it, and they looked at me and started laughing.
Margot: Finally, he went to a psychologist and was diagnosed with PTSD, and is now on disability.
Gustavo: After the break, the employers respond. And we talk about a different lawsuit that alleges an anti-Black workplace – at Tesla.
Gustavo: So Margot, all these workplace complaints. How did the warehouse companies initially respond?
Margot: The warehouse companies said that they did not deliberately allow racial harassment or racial segregation, but once the EEOC came forward with a lot of harrowing testimony and depositions from workers and from supervisors and from HR officials, the companies quickly decided to settle. And Cardinal Health paid $1.45 million to settle these claims, and Ryder Warehouse and its staffing firm, Kimco out of Orange County, paid $1 million each. So now we have 300 workers, at least, in the area who are going to be getting settlements from these companies. And now the companies have had to agree to very strict monitoring by federal agents to make sure that they are complying with anti-discrimination rules.
Gustavo: Margot, mostly we hear about white people discriminating against Blacks and Latinos. So are there stats or maybe studies on workplace animosity between Latino and Black workers?
Margot: The federal and state agencies that file suit over discrimination only keep statistics on the victims of those discrimination lawsuits. They don't keep statistics on the actual perpetrators in the lawsuits because the lawsuits are filed against the companies for either supervising this kind of behavior and not doing anything about it or retaliating against workers who complain. And that is what happened in these two lawsuits is that the federal government filed suit against the companies involved, not against the actual perpetrators in the workplace.
Gustavo: And sadly discrimination against Black people, it's not a rare thing. In fact, there was a big case in California involving Tesla. What ended up happening with the Tesla case?
Margot: Well, the state of California filed suit in February against Tesla, over 10 years of discrimination complaints from Black workers at the Fremont factory. And we interviewed some of the workers and they said that slurs and discrimination came not just from whites, but from Latino coworkers. And there was also a high-profile lawsuit brought by a Black elevator operator at Tesla who was continually harassed by Latino supervisors and coworkers with the N-word and with Spanish-language slurs. That case went before a federal jury and his Mexican American supervisor admitted to drawing a giant graffiti of an African person with huge lips and a bone through his hair in front of the guy's elevator. And the federal jury agreed that Tesla had failed to investigate the racism and awarded the elevator operator $137 million. One of the biggest jury awards ever, and the amount was later reduced by the judge to $15 million, but that's still a huge award.
Gustavo: Are state and federal officials finding more cases of anti-Black discrimination in the workplace in these past couple years?
Margot: Government agencies don't compile statistics on the race or ethnicity of coworkers who harass and discriminate. But they do track the victims. So national EEOC counts 171 federal lawsuits involving discrimination against Black workers over the last decade. That's more than all of the other racial and ethnic groups put together.
Margot: There were 59 cases involving Latino victims, 12 involving Asian victims and six involving white victims.
In California, though, we did specifically look at documents to try to determine the race and ethnicity of the perpetrators. About a third involved Latino offenders. About a third involved white offenders. And another third you couldn’t really tell from court filings. Some companies settle very quickly before depositions become public.
Gustavo: After the break, what happens when you're Afro-Latino and Latinos are discriminating against you – and how Black and and Latino activists are trying to end discrimination for everyone.
Gustavo: Margot, maybe people from the outside would think, like, why are minorities being racist against minorities, but sadly anti-Black prejudice among Latinos – it's not that big of a surprise.
Margot: Scholars have actually studied what's called colorism among Latinos. The Pew Hispanic Research Group did a really interesting study last year where it asked Latinos to self-identify according to skin color. They gave people a one-to-10 range of what their skin color was. Then they asked them how they were treated, and the Latinos with darker skin, many of them Afro-Latinos, said that other Latinos were just as likely to harass them and say negative things towards them and discriminate against them as white people were.
Barry: They would just make sure that they knew that they were belittling you and that you knew it.
Margot: Six million Americans identify as Afro Latino. That's 12% of the adult Latino population. And one of them was Barry Bryant, who was a worker at the Cardinal warehouse. And so since he was the son of a Puerto Rican father and an African American mother, he really understood what the ther workers were saying.
Barry: They would call me, “Hey, Negrito.” You know, it means Black guy, Black kid. You know, he means Black guy, black kid, whatever – but in their terms, as my girlfriend would say, it depends on how they deliver it to you. And majority, it was in a negative way, like saying, “Hey, nigger, come here.”
Margot: And that's one of the very interesting aspects of this story, right? Is that you have people who are partly Latino and partly African American, and those people understood exactly what was being said by their fellow workers in much more detail. And that is what I put into the story about Barry Bryant.
Barry: They would call me “Mayate.” That's like I said, the derogatory term of a June bug slash Black person. And because my name is Barry, it's more synonymous than Spanish there's strawberry. So they would say, “Hey, fresa,” you know, “Come here, fresa,” but they would say it like, “Come here, little gay boy,” you know, like, “Come here.” How hard is it to say Barry?
Margot tape: Was it just from Latinos or from white people too?
Barry: It was just from Latinos at that job. You felt segregated, you know, you sat with your own and nothing ever came from anybody Caucasian, white, nothing came from anybody in your own race. It was, you sat with your own, you dealt with your own because it was more, they didn't want to deal with you.
Margot: This goes back to the fact that 15 times more enslaved people were brought from Africa to Latin America than were actually brought to North America. And the Latin American countries have a long history of what's called a caste system, where they preferred people with whiter skin to either mixed race people or to Black Latinos or indigenous Latinos.
Gustavo: Margot, as Latinos become more of a force, not just in the workplace as employees, but also as owners, as bosses, are you seeing more of these discrimination cases?
Margot: We don't really know whether there are more, we just know that there's additional scrutiny to these kinds of cases because there's a much larger Latino population than there ever was before – 19% of the country is now Latino, and 39% in California. So it would be natural that Latinos would be more involved than when they were before when they were a smaller part of the population.
Margot: So among the California lawsuits that the EEOC filed involving Latino offenders, there were two big cases involving Latino owned companies that refused to hire anyone who was not Latino. One of these companies was Marquez Brothers, which makes cheese and other products at facilities in California and eight other states. And the other one was Helados La Tapatia, which is an ice cream maker in Fresno. And so the issue there was not how Black workers were treated on the job, but the fact that they and any non-Latinos couldn't even get the job to begin with.
Gustavo: Finally, back to the Inland Empire and those workers in the warehouses. Did those lawsuits and settlements change things for Black workers?
Margot: They certainly changed things at those two companies because the companies are now having to offer very specific training for their supervisors, anti-harassment training. They're having to set up phone lines where people can call in with complaints. They're being monitored by federal officials to make sure that they are recording the complaints. One of the big issues in these lawsuits is that people filed complaints and then, poof, the complaints disappear and nobody can see them. Once the federal government comes in to investigate.
Gustavo: I'm also wondering though, like, has there been any organizing around this? ’Cause it's embarrassing, again, you're supposed to, especially as Latinos get bigger in population, you should learn to not be discriminatory against other minorities, yet you're having these examples. So I would assume that say labor, like labor groups or organizers, would try to make some sort of cross-racial solidarity and would use this as a moment to teach people about this, about the importance of that.
Margot: Well, there are many, many workplaces, and especially unionized workplaces, where Blacks and Latinos get along very well. And there's been a huge effort across Southern California to encourage solidarity between Black residents and Latino residents. South Central, which was largely a Black community, has become a largely Latino community, and there were a lot of tensions around that. But for instance, the Black worker center in South Los Angeles worked with the Clean Car Wash Workers Center, which is a majority Latino group, and they supported each other's campaigns. But I think many people, and that includes the media and academics and politicians, prefer to talk about the organizing efforts that bring Black and brown workers together rather than the cases where prejudice gets out of hand. These two big Inland Empire lawsuits, they got almost no media attention.
Gustavo: And, Margot, it was thanks to those who spoke up that we’re hearing about this today.
Regina: By speaking up and filing with the EEOC, it's giving me the feeling that there is a resolution. That it's better. That others can go to work and then go home and look at their kids and say, I had a good day and actually mean it.
Benjamin: I feel good that finally, our voices are being heard from the EEOC.
Regina: Nothing gets fixed by sulking and saying nothing. If not for you, for the next generation.
Gustavo: Margot, thank you so much for this conversation.
Margot: Thank you. Gustavo.
Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of The Times, essential news from the LA Times.
Ashlea Brown and Denise Guerra were the jefas on this episode, and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Brousalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
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