A manager at AutoZone who complained she was not promoted like her male counterparts, demoted for taking leave to have a child, and eventually fired for filing a discrimination action was awarded damages yesterday of over $185 million by a California jury.
The manager, Rosario Juarez, complained that AutoZone has a "glass ceiling" policy that prevents women from being promoted to management positions like men. Juarez was eventually promoted to sales manager but only after she complained that AutoZone was guilty of discrimination. She was later urged to relinquish her management role after she informed her district manager that she was pregnant. When she refused and complained again about the company's discrimination, she was demoted upon returning to work following pregnancy leave. In response, Juarez filed a complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in 2007 and in March 2008 she filed a lawsuit in San Diego Superior Court, which was removed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of California (San Diego). In November 2008 AutoZone fired Juarez after she was blamed for a customer service representative's misplacement of register cash, which Juarez argued was part of AutoZone's scheme to get rid of her. Juarez's complaint was then amended to include a retaliation claim and the matter eventually reached a jury trial. The jury in the case, Juarez v. AutoZone Stores, Inc., 3:08-cv-00417-WVG, awarded Juarez compensatory damages of $872,719 (including past and future lost earnings and emotional distress damages) and punitive damages of $185M.
Juarez's substantial jury award -- including a massive punitive damages recovery -- provides several important lessons for employers: Employers should review promotion policies and practices to ensure they are being evenly implemented; Employers should train managers on how to respond to issues of pregnancy leave and how to handle complaints of discrimination; Employers should be extremely careful before terminating any employee who has filed an internal or external complaint of discrimination; and lawsuits involving retaliation claims should be handled with great caution since juries tend to be very sympathetic to those claims.
