Opinion ID: 616359
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Jury Finding of Retaliation

Text: Viewing the evidence, as we must, in the light most favorable to Tepperwien, there is no justification for the majority's holding that the jury's finding of retaliation amounted to sheer surmise and conjecture. In concluding otherwise, the majority begins by saying that factfinders at Entergy were not, as a matter of law, materially adverse employment actions because they were common occurrences, that Tepperwien acknowledged factfinders were helpful in most situations, and that there was good reason for Entergy to initiate the factfinders against Tepperwien. Op. at 569. Factfinders were indeed common occurrences, but not for Tepperwien. He had none until he started engaging in protected activity in November 2004, [4] and then they happened like clockwork after each of his complaints about Messina. The majority correctly points out that [c]ontext matters in our determination of whether employer action is materially adverse, Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Ry. Co. v. White, 548 U.S. 53, 69, 71, 126 S.Ct. 2405, 165 L.Ed.2d 345 (2006), and it is thus relevant to our analysis that factfinders were common at Entergy. However, Burlington Northern instructs us that the material adversity inquiry probes the perspective of a reasonable person in the plaintiff's position.  Id. at 69-70, 126 S.Ct. 2405 (emphasis added). Here then, we must consider the perspective of a reasonable person who, like Tepperwien, had never been subject to any factfinders before making a complaint of discrimination. [5] A reasonable person in such a position may well have been dissuaded from making a future charge of discrimination, despite the fact that factfinders were common for other employees, and the jury acted within reason in so finding. Second, although Tepperwien indeed testified that in  most situations, fact-finders are there to be helpful, J.A. 229 (emphasis added), the clear import of his testimony as a whole is that in his situation, the factfinders and the counseling (among other things) were harmful because they raised the specter of discipline and were issued not to address a genuine workplace concern but as punishment for his protected conduct. During one factfinder, Tepperwien told the investigating officers that the factfinder was just another witch hunt, trying to pin something on me. J.A. 270. He told the officers conducting the missing equipment factfinder that he was being made a scapegoat, and Sanfilippo essentially agreed there was no basis for the factfinder. J.A. 237. Tepperwien also explicitly told Hettler and O'Brien, who conducted the counseling that followed the missing equipment factfinder, that he thought the counseling was retaliation for his complaint the week before to the NRC. In short, the majority's suggestion that Tepperwien himself characterized the factfinders and counseling as helpful is an unfair characterization of his testimony as a whole and disregards our responsibility to view the facts in the light most favorable to Tepperwien. The majority's finding that there were good reason[s] for the factfinders usurps the jury's role. The inference that the factfinders were unwarranted efforts to pin something on Tepperwien was supported not only by Tepperwien (though his testimony alone is sufficient to sustain the jury's verdict), but also by Entergy's own investigators. As discussed above, Sanfilippo admitted that of all the people at Entergy he should have been talking to about the missing equipment, Tepperwien was the least likely candidate for a factfinder. And when that bogus factfinder was escalated to a counseling right after the complaint to the NRC, Hettler and O'Brien told Tepperwien they did not want to be subjecting him to the counseling but were ordered to do so by Cherubini. The jury was permitted to conclude from this evidence, from the tight temporal proximity between Tepperwien's complaints and the factfinders and from the overt hostility of Barry towards Tepperwien and his complaints, that the factfinders were not justified by good reasons at all but instead served to punish Tepperwien for his protected conduct. The majority also finds, as a matter of law, that not even the counseling of Tepperwien was a materially adverse employment action. Its lengthy and strained reasoning ignores the real-world consequences inflicted on Tepperwien immediately after he took his complaint outside of Entergy to the NRC: (a) the counseling, which was a form of discipline, became part of his employment record; (b) to challenge the discipline, he needed to invoke the grievance procedures of the Employee Concerns Program; (c) at the urging of the Employee Concerns Coordinator, he had to consult an attorney; and (d) the grievance process took six weeks and required him to file a detailed written submission and to submit to an interview with the coordinator. That's a lot of trouble to go through in exchange for complaining of workplace discrimination. It's certainly enough to dissuade a reasonable worker from making such a complaint. Yet the majority holds that the jury's finding to that effect amounted to sheer surmise and conjecture. The remainder of the majority's opinion in this regard divides and purports to conquer the various other bad things that happened to Tepperwien on the heels of his complaints about Messina. The result neither fairly characterizes the evidence nor convinces. For example, trivializing the remarkable fact that Tepperwien's complaint that he wasn't being protected from Messina caused Barry to threaten to toss Tepperwien off the work site, the majority says the threat was made after Tepperwien facetiously asked whether he could `kick Vito in the groin.' Op. at 571 (quoting J.A. 217). But that leaves out some evidence. Barry's threat came after Tepperwien's statement, but something important happened in between. Specifically, Barry told Tepperwien to use the company's reporting policy if Messina harassed him again. Then Tepperwien, who moments earlier had told Barry that Entergy's policies on sexual harassment and violence in the workplace are not worth the paper they're written on, protested that he had already done that twice. J.A. 217. That's when Barry made his threat. The jury rationally could have concluded that because Barry's threat immediately followed a discussion about making future complaints, a reasonable person would have been discouraged, if not dissuaded altogether, from making any such complaints. The most egregious example of appellate-court-as-factfinder is the majority's reliance on Tepperwien's Separating Employee Survey. See Op. at 572. When he left Entergy, Tepperwien indicated on a form that he liked his job and that he'd consider working there again. Without explaining why, the majority finds this useful in determining as a matter of law that Entergy did not subject him to materially adverse employment consequences in retaliation for his complaints about Messina. One obvious defect in this approach is that liking one's job or considering returning to it and reasonably feeling deterred from complaining about sexual harassment are not necessarily inconsistent, let alone mutually exclusive, as the majority suggests. But more importantly, Tepperwien gave testimony explaining his answers on the survey, which the majority fails to mention. When asked why he wrote that he would consider working for Entergy again, he told the jury that he didn't want to appear to be a disgruntled employee. J.A. 282. He elaborated that when filling out the survey he was thinking about what was going to happen in the future, was concerned about whether he was going to be able to go to work in another power plant or get another armed security position, and believed the exit survey could easily follow [him] as he sought future employment. J.A. 284. Weighing facts like Tepperwien's exit survey responses and his at-trial explanations of those responses, alongside all of the other evidence in the case, is quintessentially the function of the jury, not a court on post-verdict review. The jury in Tepperwien's case heard about his exit survey, just as it heard Tepperwien's explanations for the answers he gave in that survey, and it found that Tepperwien had been subjected to actions that would dissuade a reasonable worker from complaining of discrimination. Our job here is limited to determining whether the evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to Tepperwien, supports that verdict, not to troll the record for facts that might have supported a different one. Contrary to the majority's suggestion, protecting employees from retaliation by employers does not amount to treating them with kid gloves or in a genteel fashion, Op. at 572, or delicately, id. at 573. Nor is Title VII's commitment to such protection diluted when the workplace has security risks, like a nuclear power plant or a law enforcement agency. There is no tension between effective security and requiring an employer to respect an employee's right to make good faith complaints of employment discrimination without being subjected to materially adverse actions by the employer. The majority's needless suggestions to the contrary have no support in logic or our case law, and by demeaning the antiretaliation provision in Title VII they create the potential for mischief in this and other unspecified contexts in which employers will be permitted to treat employees in the rough and tumble manner in which Tepperwien was treated in this case. Op. at 572. Finally, though jury findings are always entitled to great deference, it is hard to conjure a context in which they deserve it more than in this one. The Supreme Court has emphasized that the determination of whether challenged conduct meets the materially adverse standard is especially fact-intensive. In Burlington Northern, it stated that the significance of any given act of retaliation will often depend upon the particular circumstances. Context matters. The real social impact of workplace behavior often depends on a constellation of surrounding circumstances, expectations, and relationships which are not fully captured by a simple recitation of the words used or the physical acts performed. 548 U.S. at 69, 126 S.Ct. 2405 (internal quotation marks omitted). And earlier this year, in Thompson v. N. Am. Stainless, LP, ___ U.S. ___, 131 S.Ct. 863, 178 L.Ed.2d 694 (2011), the Court stated that [g]iven the broad statutory text and the variety of workplace contexts in which retaliation may occur, Title VII's antiretaliation provision is simply not reducible to a comprehensive set of clear rules. Id. at 868. Retaliation claims thus implicate a broad remedial provision, violations of which are determined only after a searching review of all aspects of the challenged actions and the wider context in which they occurred in order to determine the real social impact of workplace behavior. Jurors are obviously better suited to determining the social impact of contemporary workplace behavior than are judges. The majority thus not only usurps the proper role of the jury but substitutes for that body a factfinder with significant, perhaps even disabling, institutional limitations.