Teachers. Can you find the analogy between Bloomberg's management style and what is happening to senior/experienced teachers in NYC? Read the following about the Man Who Would Be President.
(Article printed in The New York Post)
FLOOD OF 'SICK' JOB BIAS
DOZENS OF ADDITIONAL SUITS HIT BLOOMBERG'S FORMER COMPANY
September 30, 2007 -- Mayor Bloomberg's media and financial-services company is a "cesspool of discrimination" where some females, people over 35 and employees with health problems are harassed, belittled and "managed out" of the company, according to dozens of lawsuits and complaints, The Post has learned.
The alleged abuse of employees at Bloomberg LP goes beyond the pattern of sex discrimination charged by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a lawsuit last week.
The EEOC said the company repeatedly demoted and slashed the pay of women who returned to work after having babies.
The multibillion-dollar firm founded by Bloomberg denies any bias, saying it intends to "defend the case vigorously."
But many other employees complained the company harassed and demeaned them when they needed medical care or reached age 40.
Job applicants over age 35 were routinely rejected as "not a fit" - company code for too old, according to testimony in an ongoing suit.
Attorney David Kearney said his Manhattan-based firm, the Law Offices of Neal Brickman, has represented more than 20 Bloomberg LP employees with claims of age, disability and gender discrimination since 1998.
"The company is a cesspool of discrimination, and Mayor Mike set the tone and the mold," Kearney charged yesterday. "Now would be a good time for Mr. Bloomberg to demonstrate national leadership by doing right by those who suffered discrimination by his namesake Bloomberg LP."
A City Hall spokesman referred questions on the litigation to Bloomberg LP. A spokeswoman for the company, Judith Czelusniak, said yesterday that claims the mayor perpetuated a climate of bias are "nonsense."
"This is a great place to work," she said. "The company is extremely family friendly."
A 1998 sex-harassment suit charged Bloomberg created a corporate culture that favored sexy young women to peddle his popular financial-information terminals - and cast them aside when they got married or pregnant. It accused Bloomberg, as the main offender, as well as his company. He settled the suit in 2001, just before becoming mayor, sources said.
"Women who applied for sales positions were required to meet criteria of sex appeal," the suit charged. "Women who were less attractive or married were ridiculed, and new mothers and recently married women lost lucrative portions of their sales territory, were denied business opportunities, had their pay cut and received inferior bonuses."
In the infamous case, which made news soon after Bloomberg was elected, saleswoman Sekiko Sekai Garrison, fired in 1995 in alleged retaliation for her complaints, described a hostile work environment in which females were treated like sex objects, "ugly" women were insulted, and nursing moms were mocked for having "leaky boobs."
She accused Bloomberg himself of making numerous crude sexual remarks, such as telling her, "If only you had legs and a-- like Cybill Shepherd," asking her, "Are you still dating your boyfriend? You giving him good [oral sex]?" and telling a male colleague in her presence, "That's a great piece of a--."
In the EEOC case, Bloomberg employees Tanys Lancaster and Jill Patricot and others echo Garrison's complaints about the treatment of expectant and new moms.
The firm also prefers young employees, often right out of college, because it can work them the hardest at the lowest pay, according to an ongoing suit filed in 2005 by four employees, ages 55 to 65, who charge age discrimination.
The suit squarely blames the mayor - disputing his claim that he bowed out of the company's management after taking city office in January 2002. It argues that he set the tone and allowed it to continue.
The company "proved to be an unusual work environment, due to Michael Bloomberg's preference for much younger subordinates," say court papers filed in federal court in New Jersey, where Bloomberg LP had operations in Princeton until transferring them to Manhattan about a year ago.
A former recruiter came forward to bolster the age-discrimination charges. Matthew Brown, hired in 2003 in his mid-20s, did initial interviews with job applicants at "recruitment villages" Bloomberg LP set up at colleges and elsewhere.
Résumés of many older applicants got tossed.
"I witnessed it many times, applicants thrown out for little reason besides age," Brown testified under oath.
He said he once asked his supervisor why a qualified applicant, apparently in his early 40s, whom he'd called back for two more interviews was not offered a job. She pulled Brown into a conference room and angrily berated him.
"Why did you bring him in? He's not a fit!" he quoted her as yelling.
One of the plaintiffs, Vera Stek, 55, who joined Bloomberg News as an editor and writer in 1995, said she was later pigeonholed in the "Lifestyles Group," also known as the "over-50" clan.
In 2001, while Bloomberg was still at the company helm, Stek brought a problem to human resources in the Princeton offices. An HR male staffer spoke to her of sexual exploits with his wife and his "desire to have sex with young females who worked at the company," Stek said in an affidavit.
"I realized then that . . . [the] alleged anti-discrimination policies were utterly nonexistent," Stek's affidavit says.
Mike Bloomberg had his main office in Manhattan but visited Princeton, employees said.
Workers considered too old or no longer desirable were "managed out," a term that meant making their lives so miserable that they'd quit, the suit said.
In another suit charging disability discrimination before Bloomberg became mayor, a 35-year-old black reporter for Bloomberg's News Stocks in Manhattan says she got rave reviews in her first six months in 2001, before she suffered three blood clots to her lung.
On and off medical leave for nearly four months, she returned to Bloomberg under doctor's orders to work from home, take rests, and limit herself to eight hours of work a day.
She was told that it was against company policy to work at home but learned that some white employees enjoyed the option, the suit says. Her boss demanded that she work late, it says.
Then she was removed from her reporting beat and denied raises, the suit says. After she filed a complaint with the company, she alleged, "a co-worker told me to 'go back to Africa.' "
Bloomberg LP settled her suit for an undisclosed sum.
A former Bloomberg news producer, 40, filed a disability-discrimination suit in 2005 after taking a two-month medical leave in June 2004 to undergo reconstructive ankle surgery.
Garitt Kono, the producer of "Bloomberg Tomorrow Tonight" in Manhattan, charged that only a month after announcing he needed the surgery, his bosses posted ads for his job. He returned in two months to find he'd been demoted to "booker," the suit says. When Kono began fighting his demotion, higher-ups slapped him with charges of insubordination.
Kono was even addressed in e-mail by the man hired to replace him as a "douchebag." Bloomberg LP settled the suit, records show.
In another suit, filed in state court in Manhattan in 2005, James Kingsland says he was demoted from his top post as afternoon news director, in charge of 25 reporters and editors, after being diagnosed with kidney disease.
"Michael Bloomberg personally hired Kingsland" in 1992 as a news anchor at age 28, poaching him from rival CNBC, the suit says. He rose in pay and prominence until becoming sick in 2002.
He took medical leave in October 2004 and got a kidney transplant in March 2005.Despite assurances that his old job awaited him, the suit says, he returned in May to learn that his position had been "reevaluated" and that his health would not allow him to "handle the expanded hours and duties of the job."
He was reassigned as a "menial copy editor" and his annual salary was slashed by $70,000, says the suit, which was settled in January.
In a suit filed in August, Atilio Arelo, 59, a former Portuguese translator for Bloomberg in Princeton, says the company waged a "vicious campaign to manage him out" in 2003 after he was diagnosed with coronary artery disease.
The company denies the charge.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Wolff and Susannah Cahalan
susan.edelman@nypost.com
