DeJoy's family company was sued over shocking racism, sexual assault, wage theft, and more

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday August 20, 2020 · 5:30 PM PDT

2020/08/20 · 17:30

no image description available — Serious question: Are there any 'major Republican donors' who haven't been?

Part of Trump Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's credentials for handling a government agency as large and spread-out as the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is his creation of New Breed Logistics, a family shipping company that would eventually become a 9,000 employee operation and be sold off for $615 million, enough money that DeJoy could become a major Republican donor. That's not the primary credential DeJoy has, of course; DeJoy's primary qualification for a role in Trump's hyper-corrupt basket of grifters is that DeJoy is heavily invested in shipping companies that are not the USPS, and therefore stands to make a serious chunk of change if he can either redirect a larger chunk of the nation's mail to those companies or, alternatively, sabotage the constitutionally-mandated USPS severely enough to cause those redirections to become nonoptional.

But DeJoy's business credentials may also be taking a hit as well, after new scrutiny. VICE did some compiling of past lawsuits and found that DeJoy's "family" company, New Breed, was in many cases a rather gross and sketchy place to work. New Breed was the subject of lawsuits relating to sexual assault, sexual harassment, racism, wage theft, and union busting.

Some of the behavior described in the lawsuits is appalling stuff—as is, in each case, New Breed's eagerness to fire those who made the complaints. It's the union-busting that's probably the most relevant to DeJoy's new position; in 1997, the National Labor Relations Board determined that DeJoy and company took extreme efforts to hide job opportunities from union workers after taking over the Compton Army Terminal in California—and yes, DeJoy himself was making those decisions.

But the severity of the complaints against New Breed are ... illuminating. This was not a company with a firm handle on how to, say, make it clear that employees were not allowed to burn swastikas onto the tools used by their Black coworkers. Which may tell us only that the company head, DeJoy, has always been a standard-issue Republican, or may tell us something more.

DeJoy's family company was sued over shocking racism, sexual assault, wage theft, and more

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