Three workers at Siemens Energy's manufacturing plant in Hamilton, New Jersey are suing the company for racial discrimination. Solomon Daniels, Barry Murphy and Eddie Clarke charge that years of racial intimidation boiled over when someone hung a noose in the locker room.
"I was more or less terrified," said Daniels, 48, an African American man who lives in Burlington. Horrified by the noose, which evokes lynchings, Daniels looked twice to make sure, then called a coworker into the locker room to witness it. He took pictures.
That was Jan. 27. On Friday, Daniels and two other African American employees at Siemens Demag Delaval Turbomachinery Inc. talked to reporters about what they called a factory floor culture of racism and harassment in which African Americans couldn’t get promoted and complaints to the human resources department went nowhere.
Represented by lawyer Brian K. Wiley in North Wales, the men have filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights.
"When I first started there, the n-word was like your first name," said Barry Murphy, 64, of Willingboro.
Employed at Siemens since 1966, Murphy, a machinist, wept Friday, saying he came forward so younger black workers wouldn’t have to experience the discrimination he faced. He said there hasn’t been an African American supervisor since the 1980s.
The three workers claim that there is little or no chance for blacks to advance at Siemens, and that they've faced often dangerous retaliation for complaining. For instance, in 2010 Clarke claimed that after he complained about racial discrimination, a supervisor warned him he might face "friendly fire" for speaking out. Shortly afterward, Clarke had his leg sliced up when someone rigged a metal shank next to his tool cabinet.
Siemens says it is still conducting an internal investigation, but hasn't been able to track down who hung the noose. There's no word yet about whether Clarke's supervisor has been disciplined yet. That isn't exactly an encouraging sign--one would think he'd at a minimum have gotten a pretty long vacation.
If even half of this is true, those three men ought to get enough of a settlement for them to retire. The alleged conduct is, to put it mildly, flat-out unacceptable, and heads need to roll.