After 25 years at the Chicago Park District and a number of promotions, Lydia Vega was fired in 2012 for allegedly falsifying 11 timesheets. The internal investigation, prompted by an anonymous call, was seriously flawed; among other errors, the investigators surveilled the wrong car on several of the 11 days. Ms. Vega was fired without any consultation with her manager or any progressive discipline, both in violation of union agreements. She sued in 2013, claiming that the real reason for her termination was discrimination against her as a Hispanic woman. After years of hard-fought litigation and a seven-day jury trial, Ms. Vega prevailed, and in 2019 won $155,000 in back pay, $1,200 in lost bonuses, $9,000 for health insurance, $300,000 for emotional distress, and $55,000 to pay the income taxes on the back pay award, for a total of $521,200. The trial court also ordered that Ms. Vega be reinstated to her position as a park supervisor.
After an unsuccessful appeal by the city in 2020, the trial court awarded Ms. Vega more than $1.2 million in attorneys’ fees. Chicago filed yet another appeal, which it lost in late 2021. At the same time, while the city had properly withheld Ms. Vega’s pension contributions from the back pay award, it refused to pay that money or its own share of pension payments into the pension fund and refused to issue Ms. Vega pension credits for the time she was unemployed. Ms. Vega asked the trial court to hold the city in contempt, and the city was ordered to make those pension contributions and issue those pension credits not later than March 31, 2022. Oh, yes, and to pay additional legal fees to Ms. Vega’s counsel.
In its unanimous affirmance, the appellate panel remarked that: “The amount of the award in this case is no doubt very high, even for litigation that has been going on since 2013.” The trial judge noted that the fees were “a massive amount for a single-plaintiff employment discrimination case” but were caused largely by Chicago’s “scorched-earth litigation approach”.
Scorched-earth litigation usually involves filing dozens of motions, making repetitive objections at depositions, serving oppressive document requests, asking intrusive interrogatories, and raising myriad pre-trial disputes, all in an effort to make the other party want to give up or settle for nuisance value. I peeked at the trial court docket for the Vega case, and saw that there were close to 500 entries: That’s more than one filing every week for the eight years that the litigation has lasted so far.
And lawyers who represent employees in discrimination cases, whistleblower lawsuits, and retaliation claims have probably seen the scorched-earth tactic more than once. So have judges, and, as we have seen, they can take an employer’s bullying tactics into consideration when determining any final award.
Vega v. Chicago Park District, 12 F.4th 696 (7th Cir. 2021)
What this means to you:
A respectful workplace conducts fair investigations, abides by its contractual commitments, and plays by the rules. The Chicago Park District did none of those, and it has cost the city (and its taxpayers) nearly $2 million.
At Fair Measures, we specialize in creating respectful workplaces for businesses by training executives, managers and employees about how to create shared organizational culture based on values, policies, and laws.
Call us today at 800-458-2778 or email emailing us to find out more or to book a workshop.
Updated 03-08-2022
Information here is correct at the time it is posted. Case decisions cited here may be reversed. Please do not rely on this information without consulting an attorney first.
