Fluor Unit Employee’s Race, Retaliatory Harassment Suit Revived

A Fluor Corp. subsidiary was wrongly granted judgment against a Black employee who alleges White coworkers subjected him to race-based harassment, and harassed him further for opposing their bias, the Sixth Circuit ruled Wednesday.

A lower court didn’t separately analyze whether the former maintenance worker subjectively regarded his work environment as abusive and whether a reasonable employee would have felt likewise, a unanimous appeals panel said. It also improperly discounted some evidence as facially neutral and failed to review the harassment evidence “holistically,” the panel said.

Jason Jones’ racial harassment evidence raised fact issues for trial for similar reasons to ...