Three months after Charlene Smith was fired, she’s still angry about what she calls her “wrongful termination,” and she alleges there’s a pattern of discrimination against minority employees at Westminster-Canterbury of the Blue Ridge . “I was falsely accused of sleeping on the job,” says Smith, a certified nurse assistant who had worked at the posh Pantops retirement community for more than a year. She says she was folding laundry at the end of a double shift at 7am April 4 when a nurse she’d never seen before came in. When Smith returned to work that afternoon at 3pm, she was called into the nurse manager’s office and told she was fired for sleeping. “I was so upset,” says Smith. “I was hysterical. I couldn’t believe they’d make up something like that.” Smith contends that she was not asleep, but if she had been, she should have been written up like a white employee who was found sleeping three times, including once by the facility’s chief executive officer– but who was not fired until a month after Smith’s termination. And that, Smith alleges, is a pattern at the facility, where black employees are fired for things that white employees do with impunity. She’s filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “I would have to disagree with her,” says Suzanne White, director of human resources at Westminster-Canterbury, which employes 270 employees, 41 percent of whom are minorities. “We are a nondiscriminatory organi ...
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Three months after Charlene Smith was fired, she’s still angry about what she calls her “wrongful termination,” and she alleges there’s a pattern of discrimination against minority employees at Westminster-Canterbury of the Blue Ridge . “I was falsely accused of sleeping on the job,” says Smith, a certified nurse assistant who had worked at the posh Pantops retirement community for more than a year. She says she was folding laundry at the end of a double shift at 7am April 4 when a nurse she’d never seen before came in. When Smith returned to work that afternoon at 3pm, she was called into the nurse manager’s office and told she was fired for sleeping. “I was so upset,” says Smith. “I was hysterical. I couldn’t believe they’d make up something like that.” Smith contends that she was not asleep, but if she had been, she should have been written up like a white employee who was found sleeping three times, including once by the facility’s chief executive officer– but who was not fired until a month after Smith’s termination. And that, Smith alleges, is a pattern at the facility, where black employees are fired for things that white employees do with impunity. She’s filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. “I would have to disagree with her,” says Suzanne White, director of human resources at Westminster-Canterbury, which employes 270 employees, 41 percent of whom are minorities. “We are a nondiscriminatory organi ...