DES MOINES, Iowa (Legal Newsline) - The State of Iowa doesn’t have to pay a $790,000 jury award to a state employee who claimed a hostile work environment based mostly on secondhand reports she received as an administrator overseeing social workers in the Iowa Department of Human Services.
The jury shouldn’t have been allowed to hear allegations of harassment that plaintiff Tracy White never witnessed herself, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled, and White didn’t present enough evidence she was personally subjected to a hostile work environment. The supervisor White complained about ultimately was fired while the plaintiff is still in her job, the court said.
Secondhand reports are of relatively little value in showing that White personally experienced severe or pervasive harassment, particularly those that she learned about through her official duties as a supervisor,” the court ruled in an April 12 decision by Justice Thomas Waterman.
White sued the state in 2019, soon after her former supervisor Mike McInroy, with whom the court said she had “a fraught relationship,” was terminated. White claimed a hostile work environment in violation of the Iowa Civil Rights Act, citing multiple instances of inappropriate conduct related to her as a human-resources administrator.
White said she attended a meeting where McInroy observed a female social worker’s tight, short red dress and said he couldn’t decide whether to pray she dropped a pencil or pray she didn’t. White also said McInroy gave lighter work duties to a female colleague who described herself as the supervisor’s “work wife.” Other allegations were reported to White by women she oversaw as an administrator.
The trial judge allowed the jury to consider the me-too allegations involving other workers, as long as White was aware of that conduct. After an 11-day trial, the jury awarded her $260,000 for past emotional distress and $530,000 for future distress.
The state moved for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, citing a lack of evidence White herself was harassed. When the judge rejected the motion, the state appealed and the Iowa Supreme Court threw out the verdict.
“White’s poor relationship with McInroy and his practice of favoring another woman is insufficient to prove White was subjected to severe or pervasive harassment because of her gender,” the high court ruled. “Merely having a bad boss does not get an ICRA hostile-work-environment claim to the jury.”
To prove an ICRA hostile-work-environment claim, the court said, the plaintiff must establish she belongs to a “protected group” and was harassed based on that protected characteristic in a way that affected the conditions of employment.
The Supreme Court didn’t go as far as to disallow secondhand reports altogether, as the state requested, but ruled White hadn’t produced enough first-hand evidence for her own claims to survive.
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