Opinion ID: 165179
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Failure to hire as BRCC Executive Director

Text: 15 We begin by noting an important distinction between Sandoval's position as Director, to which she claims she was appointed in July 1995 with McCaa as her mentor, and the position of BRCC Executive Director for which the EC initiated a nationwide search starting in May 1997. Prior to the reorganization of the BRCC in 1996, the BRCC Director answered to the Boulder County Sheriff and to the Boulder City Chief of Police. After the new IGA entered into force in March 1996, the position of BRCC Executive Director was under the sole control of the Executive Committee — the Executive Director was to serve at the pleasure of the EC and was the EC's only employee. As Sandoval notes, the City paid her salary at all times relevant to the dispute, and she remained a City employee throughout this time. Sandoval may well have held the title of BRCC Director in May 1995, but she does not dispute that she was never hired by the EC to serve as Executive Director of the post-IGA, reorganized BRCC. In fact, the EC's failure to hire her for that position is the main focus of her disparate treatment claim. 16 To survive summary judgment, a plaintiff bringing a Title VII failure to hire claim must first establish the four elements of a prima facie case of discrimination by showing that: 17 (i) plaintiff belongs to a protected class; (ii) plaintiff applied and was qualified for a job for which the employer was seeking applicants; (iii) despite being qualified, the plaintiff was rejected; and (iv) after plaintiff's rejection, the position remained open and the employer continued to seek applicants from persons of [plaintiff's] qualifications. 18 Kendrick v. Penske Transp. Servs., Inc., 220 F.3d 1220, 1226 (10th Cir.2000) (quoting McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792, 802, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 36 L.Ed.2d 668 (1973)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Once the plaintiff establishes a prima facie case, the burden shifts to the employer to articulate legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for the contested action. Kendrick, 220 F.3d at 1229-30. [I]f a plaintiff presents evidence that the defendant's proffered reason for the employment decision was pretextual — i.e. unworthy of belief, the plaintiff can withstand a summary judgment motion and is entitled to go to trial. Id. at 1230. 19 To avoid summary judgment on her claims against the City, however, Sandoval must also show that the City was responsible for the discrimination she claims to have suffered. Because she has not shown that the City was either directly or vicariously responsible for the BRCC's allegedly discriminatory failure to hire her, we conclude that the district court's entry of summary judgment on Sandoval's failure to hire claim was appropriate. 20
21 Although Sandoval argues that the City is directly liable for the alleged discrimination of the BRCC Executive Committee, she fails to identify any discriminatory actions taken by Police Chief Koby or Fire Chief Larry Donner, the City's two representatives on the EC. Nor does Sandoval allege that these two City representatives were able to control the hiring decisions of the seven-member Executive Committee. In his deposition testimony below, Koby stated that he thought the EC had discriminated against Sandoval on the basis of her gender, her race, and her national origin, and included himself as a culpable participant in that discrimination. But Koby appears not to have acted on whatever discriminatory feelings he might have had. To the contrary, Koby was Sandoval's consistent advocate on the EC, first urging the EC to forego a national search and simply appoint Sandoval as the Executive Director of the new BRCC, and then arguing during the interview process that Sandoval should be selected for the top position. Whatever the strength of Sandoval's discrimination charge against the BRCC, she cannot hold the City directly liable for the BRCC's failure to hire her in the absence of any evidence that the City contributed to the alleged discrimination. 22
23 Sandoval also claims that the City should be held vicariously liable for the BRCC Executive Committee's allegedly discriminatory refusal to hire her as Executive Director, arguing that the City and the BRCC were her joint employers or, in the alternative, that the two entities constituted a single employer for purposes of Title VII liability.
24 We weigh four factors in considering whether two nominally separate entities constitute an integrated enterprise or a single employer: (1) interrelations of operations; (2) common management; (3) centralized control of labor relations; and (4) common ownership and financial control. Bristol v. Bd. of County Comm'rs of the County of Clear Creek, 312 F.3d 1213, 1220 (10th Cir.2002) ( en banc ). For purposes of finding shared liability, we generally consider the third factor — centralized control of labor relations — to be the most important. Id. See also 1 Arthur Larson & Lex K. Larson, Employment Discrimination § 5.03[1][a], at 5-22 (2d ed. 2003) ([T]o determine whether both entities are properly before the court, the four-part [ ] test has been recited by the courts. But an examination of the decisions nevertheless shows that the courts rely primarily on one factor when determining whether an entity is liable under Title VII: the extent of control an entity has over employment decisionmaking.) 25 The post-IGA BRCC and the City of Boulder do not satisfy our single employer standard. Sandoval has pointed to no evidence in the record showing that the BRCC and the City had sufficiently interrelated operations. The City Police Department's secondment of its employees to the BRCC, like its receipt of emergency communications services from the BRCC, merely identified the City as one of the member-municipalities of the BRCC. See Frank v. U.S. West, Inc., 3 F.3d 1357, 1362-63 (10th Cir.1993) (listing common indications of interrelated operations, including joint bookkeeping and payroll, shared office space and equipment, common employees, or common advertising). Nor did the BRCC and the City have common management, since the heads of the City Fire and Police Departments only occupied two out of the seven seats on the BRCC's Executive Committee, and the EC had no influence over the general operations of the Boulder City Police or Fire Departments. Cf. id. at 1364 (listing circumstances of common management as those including identical or heavily overlapping officer ranks or boards of directors, and common presidents). 26 Most importantly, the BRCC and the City Police did not share centralized control of labor relations. Under the 1996 IGA, all BRCC staff other than the Executive Director remained employees of their respective municipal agencies but were effectively seconded to the BRCC through the localities' contract with the BRCC. The BRCC Executive Committee had oversight over work and discipline issues within the BRCC, and the EC had authority to terminate any staff member's assignment to the BRCC. The EC did not, however, have any influence over any staff member's continued employment with his or her home agency. As was pointed out above, the Executive Director of the BRCC was an at will employee of the EC, and the City's influence on the hiring and firing of the Executive Director was limited to its two votes on the seven-member Executive Committee. 27 In Swallows v. Barnes & Noble Book Stores, Inc., the Sixth Circuit found, in similar circumstances, that a university and the bookseller with whom it had contracted to run its bookstore could not be considered a single employer for purposes of the ADA and the ADEA. 128 F.3d 990, 995-96 (6th Cir.1997). The university had retained control over which employees of the private bookseller could be assigned to staff the university bookstore, but the school had no control over the bookseller's hiring or firing decisions. Id. at 995. 28 We have previously observed that the right to terminate employment is the most important aspect of the control over the terms and conditions of an employment relationship that we require in this context, Bristol, 312 F.3d at 1219, and we therefore conclude, as did the Sixth Circuit, that while an organization's ability to control which employees of a contract partner are assigned to work for that organization may give it a voice in certain employment decisions made by the contract partner, it does not grant the kind of control over the partner's employment decisions that would justify treating the two entities as a single employer. See Swallows, 128 F.3d at 995. 3 We conclude, therefore, that Sandoval cannot hold the City liable for any discrimination on the part of the BRCC Executive Committee under a single employer theory.
29 Sandoval claims, in the alternative, that the City and the BRCC Executive Committee were joint employers, and that the City can be held vicariously liable for the discrimination of which she accuses the BRCC. As we explained in Bristol, the single-employer test asks whether two nominally separate entities should in fact be treated as an integrated enterprise, while the joint-employer test assumes that the alleged employers are separate entities. 312 F.3d at 1218. We treat independent entities as joint employers if the entities share or co-determine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment. In other words, courts look to whether both entities exercise significant control over the same employees. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Swallows 128 F.3d at 993 n. 4 (The basis of the [joint employer] finding is simply that one employer while contracting in good faith with an otherwise independent company, has retained for itself sufficient control of the terms and conditions of employment of the employees who are employed by the other employer.) (quoted in Larson, supra, § 5.03[1][c], at 5-24). Most important to control over the terms and conditions of an employment relationship is the right to terminate it under certain circumstances. Bristol, 312 F.3d at 1219. 30 While the single employer test looks at the overall relationships of the two entities, joint employer status is determined by focusing on the entities' relationships to a given employee or class of employees. The joint employment relationship, in other words, is employee-specific. See Sizova v. Nat'l Inst. of Standards & Tech., 282 F.3d 1320, 1330 (10th Cir.2002) (When a worker is formally employed by one organization, but important aspects of his work are subject to control by another organization, both organizations are employers of the worker.... Thus two entities may both be a worker's employer if they share or co-determine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment. (internal quotation marks omitted)). 31 Sandoval claims that she was discriminated against when the BRCC Executive Committee failed to hire her as its Executive Director. For the City to be even potentially liable for that failure to hire, however, Sandoval must be able to show not merely that the City and the EC might have been joint employers of the other BRCC staff, but that the City and the EC were joint employers of the position for which Sandoval applied — that of BRCC Executive Director. This she cannot do. 32 Under the terms of the IGA, the Executive Director was hired by the EC, paid out of the BRCC budget, and served at the pleasure of the EC. The City's only control over the terms and conditions of the Executive Director's employment was through its representation on the EC, where two out of seven seats were occupied by City officials. Those two seats on the EC did not give the City control over the hiring decisions of the EC, as Koby's unsuccessful efforts to persuade his colleagues to appoint Sandoval as Executive Director amply demonstrate, and there is nothing in the record to indicate that the City or its representatives on the EC could have forced the removal of whomever was hired as Executive Director. Sandoval has not pointed to any disputed material fact that could show the City shared or co-determined the essential terms and conditions of the Executive Director's employment. Thus, we conclude that the City and the EC were not joint employers for purposes of Sandoval's failure to hire claim. Since the City can be held neither directly nor indirectly liable for the allegedly discriminatory hiring decision of which Sandoval accuses the BRCC, 4 we AFFIRM the district court's entry of summary judgment. 5 , 6