Court Opinion

ID: 9627402
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 08:43:08.449585+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:06:45.460419
License: Public Domain

PAEZ, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I concur in all but Part III of the majority’s opinion. I disagree with the majority that, in light of the factual record, the constructive discharge question can be answered as a matter of law. I also disagree with the majority’s alternate holding that the district court’s constructive discharge finding was clearly erroneous. Accordingly, I would affirm the district court’s factual finding that Poland was constructively discharged, and I respectfully dissent as to Part III.
A constructive discharge finding requires the application of an objective standard. See Penn. State Police v. Suders, 542 U.S. 129, 141, 124 S.Ct. 2342, 159 L.Ed.2d 204 (2004) (“The inquiry is objective: Did working conditions become so intolerable that a reasonable person in the employee’s position would have felt compelled to resign?”). As the majority recognizes, however, whether a plaintiff meets this objective standard “is normally a factual question left to the trier of fact.” Watson v. Nationwide Ins. Co., 823 F.2d 360, 361 (9th Cir.1987); see also Wallace v. City of San Diego, 479 F.3d 616, 626 (9th Cir.2007) (“Whether working conditions were so intolerable and discriminatory as to justify a reasonable employee’s decision to resign is normally a factual question for the jury.”). Therefore, when we review a judgment after trial that is based on a constructive discharge finding, we ordinarily review that finding for clear error. See Lojek v. Thomas, 716 F.2d 675, 683 (9th Cir.1983) (“The district court’s finding that Lojek was neither subjected to intolerable employment conditions nor was he coerced to resign is not clearly erroneous.”); see also Goss v. Exxon Office Sys. Co., 747 F.2d 885, 888 (3d Cir.1984) (“Exxon contends that the trial court’s finding of fact that Goss was constructively dis*1188charged is clearly erroneous. We conclude that it is not.”).
In Wallace v. City of San Diego, we recently emphasized the deference due the trier of fact, affirming the jury’s constructive discharge finding and reversing the district court’s judgment as a matter of law to the contrary:
Although the evidence could be viewed to support a finding that Wallace’s working conditions were “favorable” to the point of barring a constructive discharge claim ... the jury saw it differently, and substantial evidence supports its finding. We cannot disregard the jury’s verdict simply because we would have weighed the evidence differently. Put another way, we do not disagree that a jury could have concluded that Wallace failed to establish constructive discharge. But ... we cannot say that the evidence permits only a conclusion that is contrary to the jury’s verdict.
479 F.3d at 629.
The majority nonetheless concludes that, as a matter of law, Poland did not suffer a constructive discharge. When we have previously reversed a constructive discharge finding as a matter of law, however, we have done so in cases only involving a “single isolated instance” of employment discrimination. See Watson, 828 F.2d at 361 (“[W]e have noted that, in general, a single isolated instance of employment discrimination is insufficient as a matter of law to support a finding of constructive discharge.... Hence, a plaintiff alleging a constructive discharge must show some aggravating factors, such as a continuous pattern of discriminatory treatment.” (internal quotation marks and emphasis omitted)); see also Wallace, 479 F.3d at 626 (“Although a single isolated incident is insufficient as a matter of law to support a finding of constructive discharge, we have upheld factual findings of constructive discharge when the plaintiff was subjected to incidents of differential treatment over a period of months or years.” (internal quotation marks and citation omitted)).
The majority does not contend that the Customs Service subjected Poland to only a single isolated instance of discrimination or retaliation. To the contrary, the district court’s factual findings establish that the Customs Service subjected Poland to differential treatment for almost a decade. See id. (“Wallace offered evidence of a pattern of discrimination and retaliation ... beginning as early 1991 and continuing through August 2000.”). Starting in 1992 or 1993, Poland’s immediate supervisor, Gary Hillberry, frequently subjected him to discriminatory remarks and treatment. Further, in retaliation for Poland filing his first EEO complaint in 1997, Hillberry changed his mind and declined Poland’s request to reassign a special agent under Poland’s supervision. Hillberry also retaliated against Poland for filing his two subsequent EEO complaints in 1998 and 1999, by issuing Poland an unsubstantiated letter of admonishment and initiating and influencing the inquiry into Poland’s managerial performance. Finally, as a result of that inquiry, the Customs Service demoted Poland from a high-level position supervising three offices and nineteen special agents and officers1 that he had held for more than ten years, to a “career *1189end[ing],” “nonessential,” and “nonsupervi-sory” position, shuffling papers.
As Poland testified:
Q. And did you have any management responsibility in [your new position]?
A. No.
Q. Did you supervise anybody?
A. No.
Q. Did you — well, what were you doing?
A. I was put in an office and told to move paper from the left side of the desk to the right side of the desk.
Q. Okay. What does that mean?
A. That means exactly that. Some courier would bring some paper in and I’d look it over and decide what sort of automated financial checks ought to be done, check — check the appropriate box and put it in the out box and somebody came by, picked it up and processed it.
Q. Did your new position involve any of the kind of judgment or discretion that you had to exercise as the RAIC for Portland?
A. None whatsoever.
Q. And you stayed in that position for approximately how many months?
A. Approximately a total of about — five and a half months, six months.
Q. All right. And what did you decide to do at the end of that period?
A. Decided it was in the best interests of my family and myself, because I didn’t see — this was a career ender, that it was time to leave.
Q. Why did you decide to retire?
A. Because my career was over.
Q. Why do you say that?
A. Well, because I was in a nonsupervi-sory position, I was in a nonessential job, a job that had sat vacant for almost six months. My predecessor had retired. I had little interaction with anyone else. Based on my experience, watching other people’s career[s] end in a similar way, I was done.
Q. Did you feel that you had any promotion or lateral assignment possibilities at that point?
A. None whatsoever.
In light of this testimony, which the district court found credible, and the seven or eight years of discrimination and retaliation prior to the demotion in Poland’s duties, there was ample evidence for the district court, as trier of fact, to find that Poland was subjected to treatment sufficiently intolerable that a reasonable employee would have felt compelled to resign. See Satterwhite v. Smith, 744 F.2d 1380, 1382-83 (9th Cir.1984) (affirming the district court’s finding of a constructive discharge on similar facts, and discussing other similar decisions).
Further, because these circumstances are sufficient under our deferential standard of review to show that Poland suffered a constructive discharge, the district court’s finding is not undermined by the evidence that the Customs Service regularly transferred its employees to different locations. Even if Poland’s move across the country may not have been intolerable in and of itself, the move culminated in a drastic demotion in duties that the district court found objectively intolerable under the circumstances. Likewise, in light of the demotion and the years of discriminatory and retaliatory treatment, the district court’s finding is not undermined by the fact that Poland’s pay remained the same. See Buckley v. Hosp. Corp. of America, Inc., 758 F.2d 1525, 1530-31 (11th Cir.1985) (rejecting defendant’s contention that plaintiff was not constructively discharged because she was offered another position at the same pay, because plaintiff “testified she found [the new position] ‘humiliating’ after her years of service in su*1190pervisory positions”); see also Ramos v. Davis & Geek, Inc., 167 F.3d 727, 731 (1st Cir.1999) (“[T]he fact that salary and benefits have not been decreased has never been held to be a conclusive factor [for a constructive discharge finding] .... ”); Real v. Cont’l Group, Inc., 627 F.Supp. 434, 443 (N.D.Cal.1986) (“Continental makes much of the fact that despite the plaintiffs demotion and job offers graded substantially below the job he held prior to June 1981, Mr. Real suffered no reduction in his salary or benefits. This fact alone is not enough to defeat the jury’s finding of constructive discharge.”).
Nor is the majority’s reversal of the district court’s factual finding justified simply because Poland worked for about five months after his demotion before resigning. We have never held that continuing to work for a period of months following an adverse employment decision precludes a constructive discharge finding. In the decisions cited by the majority, we merely affirmed findings that there was no constructive discharge; we did not suggest that the trier of fact could not have found to the contrary. See Manatt v. Bank of America, 339 F.3d 792, 804 (9th Cir.2003); Montero v. AGCO Corp., 192 F.3d 856, 861 (9th Cir.1999); see also Smith v. Bath Iron Works Corp., 943 F.2d 164, 167 (1st Cir.1991). Also, in each of those cases, the plaintiffs conceded that the alleged discriminatory treatment had stopped entirely months or years before they resigned. Poland, however, was still subject to retaliatory treatment when he resigned, as the Customs Service kept him at a nonessential, nonsupervisory, career-ending job, moving papers from one side of his desk to the other. Moreover, we recently held that a similar, three-month delay in resigning did not “preclude[] a conclusion that [the plaintiff] was constructively discharged.” Wallace, 479 F.3d at 627. As we explained:
Although the dissent would conclude otherwise, the jury could have viewed [the plaintiffs] efforts to stay on the job despite the intolerable conditions as evidence that he indeed had “the normal motivation of a competent, diligent, and reasonable employee to remain on the job to earn a livelihood and to serve his or her employer.” Brooks v. City of San Mateo, 229 F.3d 917, 930 (9th Cir.2000) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Id. at 629 n. 7.
Accordingly, there is no basis for the majority’s decision in the instant case to circumscribe a new area within which there can be no constructive discharge as a matter of law. For the same reasons, I would hold on this record that the district court’s factual finding that Poland was constructively discharged was not clearly erroneous, and I would therefore affirm.

. As Resident Agent in Charge ("RAIC”) of the Portland office, Poland supervised twelve agents, each of whom worked in either a commercial fraud group or a narcotics and money laundering group. The supervisor of each group reported directly to Poland. Poland also supervised a security officer and an administrative officer and the Customs Service's branch offices in Coos Bay (an office with three special agents) and Astoria (an office with two special agents).