San Francisco Ordered to Pay $1 Million in Reverse Discrimination Case
A court has ordered San Francisco to pay approximately $1 million in attorneys’ fees to a plaintiff who won a reverse discrimination suit against the city.
Allen Harmon, who is white, won a reverse discrimination verdict in 2004 based on the city’s failure to promote him to a supervisor job at the San Francisco International Airport. The jury awarded him $30,300 in damages after determining that he was denied the promotion partly because of his race. Harmon alleged that a minority candidate wrongfully got the promotion due to the city’s race-based quotas. The jury agreed.
The lesson? Employers (particularly those in the private sector) need to be careful not to discriminate against non-minority applicants in their zeal to promote diversity. The best policy is to cast the widest net possible during the recruiting process but then to make all hiring and promotion decisions on purely non-discriminatory job-related criteria. Also, an employer liable for discrimination may wind up paying the plaintiff’s attorneys’ fees (which, as this case graphically demonstrates, could far outweigh the actual damages).
