Court Opinion

ID: 9491646
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:19:34.238665+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:51.808082
License: Public Domain

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Against the backdrop of considerable evidence that Indurante and most of his colleagues lost their jobs as the result of a top-to-bottom house cleaning in Local 705, Indu-rante’s claim of national origin discrimination may not seem particularly strong. Yet, he does have evidence (which we are obligated to credit on summary judgment) that two highly-placed union officials, McCormick and Burke, independently spoke of a plan to terminate all of the Italian-Amerieans, as well as the pronouncement by Zero, the trustee and future head of the Local, that “the days of the goombahs are over.” These remarks, all uttered by individuals who at one time or another were decisionmakers, readily support the inference that bias against Italian-Amerieans may have played a role in the decision to discharge Indurante. Whether Indurante has cited these remarks as direct evidence of discrimination, see, e.g., Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 270-73, 109 S.Ct. 1775, 1801-02, 104 L.Ed.2d 268 (1989) (O’Connor, J., concurring), or as evidence that the nondiscriminatory reasons that the Local has articulated for his discharge are pretextual, see McDonnell-Douglas Corp. v. Green, 411 U.S. 792, 802-05, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 1824-26, 36 L.Ed.2d 668 (1973); Texas Dep’t of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 253-56, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 1094-95, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981), in the end is immaterial; either way, the remarks establish a fact question as to the real reason for Indurante’s termination.
My colleagues write these comments off as “stray remarks,” see Price Waterhouse, 490 U.S. at 277, 109 S.Ct. at 1804-05 (O’Connor, J., concurring), because they did not mention Indurante, did not forecast his individual demise, were substantially separated in time from his discharge, and in the case of Zero’s ethnically-charged reference to “the days of the goombahs” being over, because they were not made to employees of the Local and did not expressly refer to employment. When two decisionmakers reveal that there is a plan in the works to get rid of the Italian-Amerieans, the omission to mention the plaintiff or his discharge in particular would seem to be a minor point — there is no dispute, after all, that Indurante is Italian-American, was perceived as such, and that he was indeed terminated.1 That McCormick *369and Burke uttered these remarks sixteen months before Zero fired Indurante is a more salient observation, but one addressed to the ultimate weight of this evidence rather than to whether it is stray or on point. The fact is, some plans take a good while to carry out. Zero’s own remark five months after Indurante’s termination could be understood as confirmation that the mission had at last been accomplished; to the extent the content or context of his comment render it ambiguous, sorting out its meaning is not a task for the court on summary judgment. Huff v. UARCO, Inc., 122 F.3d 374, 384 (7th Cir.1997), citing Shager v. Upjohn Co., 913 F.2d 398, 402 (7th Cir.1990).
I find myself unable to agree, therefore, that these remarks are too remote from the discharge decision to entitle Indurante to a trial. I see no reason why, as a matter of law, a factfinder could not infer that Indu-rante’s discharge in October 1994 was simply the belated culmination of the purge of Italian-Amerieans that Burke and McCormick had foretold the year before.

. I am distressed to see my opinion for the court in Venters v. City of Delphi, 123 F.3d 956, 973 (7th Cir.1997), cited for the proposition that remarks of this kind must specifically refer to the individual plaintiff's employment situation in order to constitute direct evidence of discrimina-*369lion. Ante at 367. It certainly is true that the remarks at issue Venters did focus on the plaintiff and forecast her discharge in particular, see 123 F.3d at 973-74, but nowhere in that opinion did we suggest that more generalized remarks would not constitute direct evidence of discrimination. Indeed, I am aware of no case from this circuit suggesting that a remark akin to "We're going to fire all of the Blacks,” or "We're not going to hire any women” would not amount to direct evidence of discrimination solely because it does not single out the plaintiff for individual mention. Venters itself describes direct evidence of discrimination as "remarks and other evidence that reflect a propensity by the decisionmaker to evaluate employees based on illegal criteria,” id. at 973; these examples quite clearly fit that definition, as do the types of remarks that Indurante relies on here.