Court Opinion

ID: 9490684
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:51:43.756401+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:54:15.667854
License: Public Domain

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I agree with the majority that Felicia Perry’s claim of sex discrimination, in the form of sexual harassment by store manager John Jackson, was correctly denied under the narrowest grounds supported by a majority of the court in our recent en banc decisions in Jansen v. Packaging Corp. of America and Ellerth v. Burlington Industries, 123 F.3d 490 (7th Cir.1997) (“Jansen”). I write simply to explain how I would apply the Jansen standards to Perry’s case, and briefly how the approach I outlined in Jansen would apply.
First, taking the facts brought out at trial in the light most favorable to Perry, there is little question that she would have been entitled to reach the jury on the question whether the environment in which she worked crossed the line from merely unpleasant to “hostile.” The real question, though, as the majority rightly notes, is whether a jury could hold Chernin, Inc., responsible for Jackson’s behavior. Applying the Jansen test, I agree that the answer is no. Jackson evidently took care to make sure that no one else either at the Roosevelt Road store or the company more generally observed his offensive behavior. This is why Kárnia never saw anything: what manager, in front of other employees, would use the kind of language Perry alleges Jackson did? As the manager, he had the power to require her presence in more secluded areas, where he could harass unobserved. Judge Flaum noted this leverage in note 4 of his Jansen opinion, 123 F.3d at 497 n. 4, and I made a similar observation in my Jansen opinion, 123 F.3d at 566-68.
If we were to approach this case as I would have done in Jansen, the next question would be whether Jackson was acting within the scope of the authority conferred upon him. by Chernin when he committed these acts of harassment. Although Judge Flaum eventually opted for a negligence approach for so-called hostile environment cases, he would have imposed liability in the so-called quid pro quo cases only where the supervisor was using authority delegated by the employer. This “delegated authority” concept is very close to my “scope of authority” test. In Perry’s case, I would find on this.record that she failed to bring forth facts that would show that Jackson was acting within the scope of his authority (or was using his delegated powers). See Wright v. City of Danville, 174 Ill.2d 391, 221 Ill.Dec. 203, 211, 675 N.E.2d 110, 118 (1996) (Under Illinois law, “actions [that are] different from the type of acts [an employee is] authorized to perform or ... performed purely in [the employee’s] own interest [are] outside the scope of employment.”) (citations omitted); Deloney v. Board of Educ., 281 Ill.App.3d 775, 217 Ill.Dec. 123, 129, 666 N.E.2d 792, 798 (1996) (“In the context of respondeat superior liability, the term ‘scope of employment’ excludes con*1016duct by an employee that is solely for the benefit of the employee.”) (citations omitted). Apparently the majority would also view the record this way, as they have observed that Jackson was “low-level and had minimal power to make decisions affecting her job. His crude remarks usually were personal and not connected to his duties as store manager.” Ante at 1014. Those few actions he took that went beyond the personal would not, standing alone, have been enough to support a hostile environment claim. They would instead have been the kind of sporadic misbehavior that is not actionable under our cases. E.g., Saxton v. American Tel. & Tel. Co., 10 F.3d 526, 533 (7th Cir.1993) (“ ‘[Relatively isolated’ instances of non-severe misconduct will not support a hostile environment claim.”) citing Weiss v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., 990 F.2d 333, 337 (7th Cir.1993). Therefore, I too would apply a negligence standard to this case, because it is the default standard once the conduct is shown not to be within the scope of the supervisor’s employment.
Naturally, the same result follows under an attempt to distill the highest common factors from our many opinions in Jansen. Chernin can be held liable only if it was negligent in failing to discover or to remedy the harassment, and nothing indicates that its response was wanting when Perry finally complained. She herself dropped the ball when she did not meet with Dan Naslund as requested and did not in any other way supply “leads” to Chernin. (I note, however, that in her case as in many other sexual harassment eases, the harasser may have been careful not to leave any kind of trail. The company basically had a credibility decision to make, and it resolved doubts in favor of its manager. I fear this will often be the case when subordinates complain about their superiors under a company’s harassment policy. Victims of harassment may need to find creative ways to document their problems if they wish to be taken seriously.)
Finally, I agree that Perry’s claim of constructive discharge should not have reached the jury, for the reasons stated by the majority.
I therefore concur in the result.