Sometimes you just have to sue your employer. Elizabeth Carroll dealt with sexual harassment for more than a decade working on the bun wrap line at Franz Bakery in Springfield. She and several female coworkers tried going to HR and were ignored. Union reps with Bakers Local 114 tried to help but got nowhere with management. Finally a union shop steward referred Carroll to the Bennett Hartman law firm, and attorney Maral Deyrmenjian took on the case. On April 18, after a two-week trial, a jury awarded her $345,000 in damages. The jury agreed that Carroll faced a sexually hostile work environment and that Franz Bakery had failed to take appropriate corrective action.
Reading the legal complaint and the sworn depositions of Carroll and her coworkers, the Springfield bakery sounds like something out of the 1970s.
A male relief foreman was one of the offenders, but not the only one. He had a habit of throwing things like bread and dough at female workers, calling them ‘bitches’ and ‘sluts,” telling them they need to take diet pills or Xanax. He asked one woman coworker for her underwear. He called Carroll, who is married to a woman, a “dyke bitch.” He told her it made him horny when she lifted heavy things. Complaining repeatedly to higher-ups, Carroll was told repeatedly to ignore it.
Longtime production supervisor Jason Bohrer was a serial harasser too. According to the legal complaint, he had a habit of visiting the mostly-female bun wrap line to chat up women there, brushing up against them, touching them on the back, the knee, the butt. He’d call women subordinates after hours and try to turn the conversation to non-work topics. He would ask them out. Sometimes it worked. He had sexual relations with at least three female subordinates according to testimony in the trial. Women who responded to his advances got management favors — promotions, time off when they requested it, leniency when they were late. But Carroll rejected his advances. After that, he began to call her regularly to his office to discipline her for trivial complaints.
The culture went all the way to the plant manager, who according to the complaint and evidence introduced at trial behaved in sexually inappropriate and offensive ways towards Carroll and at least one other female employee.
A pattern of sexual harassment was already in place when Carroll arrived in 2009.
“They’ve been this way for a long time,” says Local 114 recording secretary Brad Currier, who has worked at the plant for more than 20 years.
“It would be brought to the company’s attention and get swept under the rug time and time again.”
Carroll learned from coworkers soon after being hired that there were certain men you had to avoid.
She tried, but found she couldn’t avoid them. She went to HR and got nowhere. Her union representatives scheduled a meeting with HR to discuss it, but the company rep was a no-show, and the plant manager tried to interrogate Carroll until her union reps physically blocked him.
It seemed there was no other avenue than to go to court. There, she was vindicated.
“I think all of this is about power,” attorney Deyrmenjian told the Labor Press. “He gets to pick on them and feel like a big guy.”
Has anything changed at Franz Springfield since the jury verdict? It’s hard to say for sure. Bohrer, the chief culprit, hasn’t been seen at the plant since the trial. The plant manager was terminated, though the union doesn’t know if the case was a factor. Franz did not return a call from the Labor Press. After the verdict, coworkers came up and thanked Carroll and told her they were proud of her.
“It’s really important that Franz understands that their conduct affects their bottom line,” Currier said.
“Word of mouth is a big deal. They need to take that very seriously and place value on the membership and the people that buy their products.”
