Opinion ID: 4528300
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The rescinded job offer

Text: On appeal from this summary judgment against Giuseffi, we view the facts in the light most favorable to her: Giuseffi used to work as a Disaster Reservist for the Chicago office of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In October 2010, FEMA fired her for refusing to accept two deployments. After losing her internal appeal, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). She alleged that by firing her, FEMA had discriminated against her on account of her disability and retaliated against her for filing a prior complaint. While that complaint was pending, she applied for a new job with FEMA’s Philadelphia office. On her application and in her interviews, she did not disclose that she had been fired by FEMA’s Chicago office. Nor did she tell anyone in the Philadelphia office that she had 2 filed a complaint with the EEOC after she was fired. So Janice Barlow, the Philadelphia FEMA official who recommended hiring her, did so under the impression that Giuseffi was still working in the Chicago office. Barlow also did not yet know that Giuseffi had filed a discrimination complaint. In November 2011, the Philadelphia office offered her the job. Giuseffi then submitted a Form 306 to FEMA’s central human-resources office in Virginia, not Philadelphia. On that form, Giuseffi disclosed, for the first time, that she had been fired and had filed a complaint with the EEOC. But nobody in Philadelphia was aware of it yet. After accepting the offer, Giuseffi contacted Kenneth Ragozzino, a FEMA humanresources specialist who reported to Barlow in Philadelphia, to postpone her start date. As he had no indication otherwise, Ragozzino thought that Giuseffi still worked for FEMA and wondered if she could use her annual leave time to delay her start date. So he reached out to FEMA’s central human-resources team in Virginia to see how much leave time she had accrued. On December 29th, the Virginia office responded that Giuseffi no longer worked for FEMA and sent him her “termination packet.” App. 96. The packet included her termination notice and her internal appeal to FEMA. But it did not mention her discrimination complaint to the EEOC. Ragozzino immediately reported this information to Barlow. Until then, she too was unaware that Giuseffi was not an active FEMA employee. As soon as she found this out, Barlow decided to rescind Giuseffi’s offer. Barlow considered her firing from the Chicago 3 office “significant”; she would not risk rehiring someone whom FEMA had just fired. App. 90. Still, at this point, Barlow still did not know that Giuseffi had filed an EEOC complaint. In a classic example of bureaucratic delegation, Barlow told Ragozzino to have the Virginia office call Giuseffi and give her the bad news. So later that same day, at 12:40 p.m., Ragozzino emailed the Virginia office, asking how to “move forward expeditiously in rescinding the final offer” and whether that could be done “today.” App. 125. Then, at 3:31 p.m., he confirmed that “[r]egional management [that is, Barlow] does want to move forward to rescind the offer” and would “prefer to do so today” by phone. App. 124 (emphasis in original). At 3:46 p.m., Ragozzino heard back from Katie Short, a human-resources employee in the Virginia office, with some new information. She had found Giuseffi’s Form 306 and told Ragozzino that Giuseffi had lodged “[a] formal complaint” with the EEOC challenging her firing. App. 221. Short heard nothing further from the Philadelphia office. Just before 3:57 p.m., she called and then emailed Giuseffi to rescind her job offer. Afterwards, Ragozzino emailed Barlow to confirm that the Virginia office had rescinded the offer. Years later, in 2014, an EEOC administrative law judge ruled for Giuseffi, finding that the Chicago office had retaliated against her when it fired her in 2010.