A former claims specialist for State Farm can move forward with her retaliation claim against the employer after a split 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined July 25 that she had presented sufficient evidence for a jury to side with her.
In Gray v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the specialist, who had worked at State Farm for 15 years, helped a friend on a different team by researching employment law and filing an internal complaint after the friend’s Americans with Disabilities Act accommodation — an exemption from overtime work — was allegedly terminated by the friend’s manager.
The manager also wrongly told the plaintiff’s friend that she had no Family and Medical Leave Act leave available, according to court documents.
A few months later, the manager substituted for the specialist’s manager while he was on a short vacation, placing him in charge of the plaintiff. While the vacationing manager had taken “a relaxed approach to State Farm’s timecard policies,” the substituting manager “pored over” the plaintiff’s time sheets and reported discrepancies between the time card and her computer activity to her manager’s supervisor and an HR representative.
HR launched an investigation and interviewed the plaintiff, who said the substituting manager was targeting her for helping her friend secure an accommodation. A week later, her own manager and his supervisor recommended her termination for time sheet falsification.
While an Ohio district court reasoned State Farm had an “honest belief” the plaintiff engaged in misconduct and granted the company summary judgment, the 6th Circuit reversed based on a number of factors.
For one, the worker presented evidence that the substituting manager used his “first opportunity” to retaliate against her, reviewing and reporting time sheet discrepancies before her own manager had even returned from vacation. The court explained that “when assessing temporal proximity, we consider whether the biased actor took the first opportunity that he had to retaliate.”
Crucially, the plaintiff argued that even if her time sheets had discrepancies, another colleague had “nearly identical discrepancies in her records” and was not singled out in the same way. While the colleague’s discrepancies were viewed as a “performance” issue and she was informally coached, the plaintiff’s discrepancies were considered an “integrity” issue and reported to HR, according to court documents.
One judge on the three-judge panel dissented, finding that the plaintiff was obligated to show her colleague comparators fell outside her protected class — specifically, that they did not engage in any ADA-protected activities.
The dissenting judge also took issue with the other judges’ use of vicarious liability, or “cat’s paw” liability, which “hinges on a neutral decisionmaker acting on a biased subordinate’s input,” saying the plaintiff did not herself use this theory of liability.
The majority responded in a footnote that this opinion was “puzzling,” as the plaintiff raised the cat’s paw theory “again and again.” Although some of her briefings “lacked a heading with the words ‘cat’s paw’ or ‘vicarious liability,’ raising an argument does not require ‘the incantation of particular words,’” the majority noted.
6th Circuit decisions apply to Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
