The American chain of coffee shops Starbucks has been ordered to pay 256 million dollars to a white former director who denounced the company for unfairly dismissing her after the high-profile arrest of two black men in an establishment in 2018in which she was not involved.
In April 2018, the manager of a Starbucks in Philadelphia called the police because there were two black men sitting in the cafeteria without consuming, and the agents arrested them on the spot in an incident that was caught on video and went viral on social networks. , generating an image crisis for the company.
The two arrested, who said they were waiting for someone else for a business meeting, They were not charged with any crime and after being released they reached agreements not to take them to court or the companywhich paid them an undisclosed amount, or the city, which committed to a youth scholarship program.
Shannon Phillips, a regional manager who oversaw that store and who was not present at the time, she was fired less than a month after the arrests and in 2019 sued the company for taking unfair punitive action against her and other white employees, CNBC channel reported Thursday.
A jury trial that concluded last Monday in New Jersey, where Phillips filed the complaint, determined that race was a determining factor in his dismissalin violation of state and federal anti-discrimination laws, and ordered Starbucks to pay him $25.6 million in compensation.
A lawyer for the whistleblower, Laura Mattiacci, indicated during the trial that Phillips was a “scapegoat” with which Starbucks wanted to show that it was taking steps after the arrests to calm the wave of outrage that followed, her law firm, Console, wrote. Mattiacci Law, on his Facebook account.
At the timeStarbucks argued that it had fired Phillips because she was not an effective leader in a corporate crisisindicates The Wall Street Journal.
After the incident, the multinational closed its more than 8,000 stores in the US to give an educational session on racism to its almost 175,000 workers, and its then president, Kevin Johnson, offered a public apology to the men arrested.
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