On March 22, 2017, a General Motors' factory worker Mark Edwards (59) arrived at his work area inside a GM transmission plant in Toledo. Upon arriving there, he found someone had hung a noose by his work station.
That wasn't the first time Edwards, who's worked at various GM plants since 1977, has encountered racial harassment and slurs, all of which he reported to his union reps and managers; however, as with the prior incidents, he received nothing more than lip-service in response to his complaints. The March incident was, however, the first one about which he determined to no longer "grin and bear it.
Edwards and eight other workers have sued GM, alleging the company has allowed racial discrimination and has failed to take prompt corrective action after the workers reported acts of racism at the GM Powertrain & Fabrications plant. Some of the nine, including Edwards, still work there, and others have quit or transferred to other GM plants.
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Source)
Specific behaviors the lawsuit cites:
[*=1]White employees calling black employees "boy."
[*=1]A female black employee being called a crude, racist slur.
[*=1]Swastikas painted and scratched on restroom stalls.
[*=1]Stick figures with nooses around their necks drawn on restroom stalls.
[*=1]White workers wore shirts under their coveralls with visible Nazi symbols on them.
[*=1]Black employees told to be careful because a white employee's "daddy was in the Ku Klan Klan."
[*=1]White workers telling black workers to go back to Africa.
[*=1]"Whites Only" signs hung on restroom stall doors and written on walls outside the men's restroom.
[*=1]A white supervisor, at a meeting, saying, "What's the big deal about nooses? There was never a black person who was lynched that didn't deserve it." The supervisor was not disciplined, the lawsuit said.
GM's response:
"Every day, everyone at General Motors is expected to uphold a set of values that are integral to the fabric of our culture. Discrimination and harassment are not acceptable and in stark contrast to how we expect people to show up at work. General Motors is taking this matter seriously and addressing it through the appropriate court process."
-- Detroit Free Press, "
Nooses, Nazis and racist slurs tolerated at GM plant, lawsuit says
There're
subtle forms of racism, and unabashedly, conservatives seem abjectly ignorant of them; thus it wouldn't surprise me to see some of them posit a cockamamy exculpation, perhaps that a bunch of
Jains put the swastikas on the walls and that it was they wearing thus decorated shirts. Asserting that every Black lynching was warranted, wearing swastikas, admonitions to Blacks that allude to KKK involvement, and hoisting a noose at a man's work station aren't subtle!
That is what's been going on at GM. And the American people, including Black Americans, saw their tax dollars used to bail out that firm. Buried, not bailed out, is what GM deserved.