A woman who could take a joke and deal with men, being that she used to be in the military, was awarded $13 million for what she dealt with at her workplace for 6 years. If harassment does not stop and management does not do anything about it, one must take it upon themselves to fix it. That is exactly what Fayette County did:
One male colleague called her “Big Girl,” a belittling nod to her 6-foot-tall stature. Another was said to make obscene gestures when he heard her voice over the company radio. A third reportedly dismissed her complaints of harassment, saying she was “losing her mind” or “throwing fits.”
For six years, Fayette County resident Sandra S. Robertson said she endured harassment, venom and gender-based discrimination from her male colleagues as a shipping supervisor at Hunter Panels’ Smithfield plant — all the while making less than the man who was her predecessor despite her years of experience in the Air Force as a supply specialist.
“I’m former military, and I can take a joke. But things started to turn really ugly and then I noticed it wasn’t stopping,” Mrs. Robertson, 48, of German Township, said Monday. “It just kept getting worse, and management pretty much condoned it.”
A federal jury did not.
On Friday, five women and three men in a Pittsburgh courtroom found that Hunter Panels and its parent company, Carlisle Construction Materials Inc., discriminated against Mrs. Robertson, subjected her to a hostile work environment and retaliated against her by firing her. For that, jurors awarded Mrs. Robertson more than $13 million in damages and pay.
One of her attorneys, Timothy P. O’Brien, said he believed the $12.5 million in punitive damages was “by far” the largest of its kind for an employment discrimination case in the Western District of Pennsylvania.
“I think they viscerally understood that something terribly wrong had occurred,” Mr. O’Brien said.
That was the case, according to juror Douglas S. Weisz, 51, a rare-stamp trader from McMurray. He said the fundamental question of gender discrimination was a relatively simple one for the jury; the difficulty came in determining how much money Mrs. Robertson should get from Carlisle, which had $2.9 billion in revenue and $235 million in net earnings, according to a 2013 annual report.
“There were many on the jury that wanted to tag them for 10 percent of their net income, or $25 million,” Mr. Weisz said.
The company’s attorneys could not be reached for comment.
Mrs. Robertson, who is married and has an adult son, said that during her litigation, she lost weight, became depressed and could not find a new job because she had to reveal to prospective employers that she had been fired.
“This should not happen to me,” she said. “This should not happen to any woman.”
Mr. Weisz and Erin Hutchinson, the jury forewoman, both said the jury wanted to send Carlisle, a global company, a stern, unmistakable message.
”We thought, ‘What are the chances this was happening in other facilities?’ ” said Ms. Hutchinson, 37, a senior director at a marketing agency. ”This was an opportunity to set the tone.“
Mrs. Robertson’s complaint, filed in 2012, documented her career trajectory as a 20-plus-year Air Force veteran who retired in 2004 as a master sergeant. In 2006, she became a traffic clerk at a new Hunter Panels plant in Smithfield that made insulation materials.
Harassment began then and did not abate, according to her suit. She was promoted in October 2006 and complained to her superiors several times. She was fired in April 2012 for her “job performance and ‘management style,’ ” the complaint said.
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