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Giant drug store chain CVS has been hit with a class-action lawsuit centered around racial discrimination claims filed by former employees in New York. The four former store detectives claim their bosses ordered them to target Black and Hispanic shoppers.
Filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the lawsuit also says that after the detectives complained about racial discrimination against both customers and themselves, they were fired.
All of the plaintiffs are either Black or Hispanic and worked in CVS’s loss-prevention department. They allege their supervisors, who oversaw stores in Manhattan and Queens, ordered them to racially profile non-white shoppers. One supervisor in particular, Anthony Salvatore, allegedly told subordinates that “Black people always are the ones that are the thieves,” and that “lots of Hispanic people steal.” The second supervisor, Abdul Selene, advised detectives to “watch the Black and Hispanic people to catch more cases.”
The detectives also claim in court papers that they too were victims of racial discrimination. For instance, when plaintiff Kerth Pollack argued with a store manager, Salvatore phoned him and yelled at him to “get his Black ass back to the store and apologize.”
“The suit comes nearly a year after Macy’s struck a deal with Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, to pay a $650,000 fine and hire an independent monitor to address complaints that minority shoppers faced heightened surveillance and, in some cases, wrongful detention at its flagship store in Midtown,” reports The New York Times. Schneiderman also made a deal with Barneys New York, which agreed last summer to pay $525,000 and enact reforms to stop racial profiling at its Madison Avenue store.
But the CVS lawsuit, while similar, is unique. “While there have been many high-profile shop-and-frisk cases filed by customers of large retailers in recent years,” said David E. Gottlieb, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, “this is the first time a group of employees has banded together to provide an inside account and expose the blatant racial profiling policy at one of the largest retailers in the world.”
CVS issued a statement through spokesperson Carolyn Castel, who said the company “has firm nondiscrimination policies that it rigorously enforces.”
She added: “We serve all communities and we do not tolerate any policy or practice that discriminates against any group. We are shocked by the allegations in this complaint, and we intend to defend against them vigorously.”
But according to the plaintiffs– Pollack, 41; Sorhaindo, 26; Lacole Simpson, 32; and Sheree Steele, 46 — discrimination is routine at CVS.
Pollack, Simpson, and Sorhaindo worked for CVS about four years and were all fired between February and April. Steele was only employed by the chain for a few months; she was not allowed to return to work in July 2013 after taking an approved leave, according to the lawsuit.
