MAGA-Hat-Wearing White Postal Employee Loses Race Bias Lawsuit

The US Postal Service defeated a lawsuit by a White mail carrier who claimed discrimination, in part because he was treated differently for wearing a MAGA hat than a Black co-worker was for wearing a Black Lives Matter hat.

The ruling Thursday by the US District Court for the Western District of Kentucky partly turns on a rare application of the Hatch Act in the employment bias context. The 1939 law bars civil-service employees in the executive branch other than the president and vice president from engaging in certain types of political activity.

James Halbauer’s July 2020 suit alleged that his Black colleague called him a racist repeatedly after he arrived for work at their Louisville location in August 2019 wearing a Make America Great Again hat. She continued to yell at him even after a union steward told her to stop, and a supervisor later told Halbuaer that he would be escorted off the premises if he wore his MAGA hat again at work, the suit said.

The way he was treated contrasted with the treatment that the Black co-worker received when she came to work about a week later wearing a BLM hat, Halbauer said. She wasn’t required to take her hat off even after he reported it to a supervisor, he said.

That doesn’t show race-based disparate treatment, Judge Greg N. Stivers said. “Halbauer was wearing campaign paraphernalia that he was not permitted to wear due to the Hatch Act, whereas” the black employee’s “hat was not campaign-related and simply bore the name of a social movement,” the judge said.

Halbauer also pointed to other allegedly unequal treatment with regard to his dress code violations compared to the Black co-worker, including footwear. That evidence similarly failed, Stivers said in granting summary judgment to the USPS.

Halbauer didn’t make the additional showing of suspicious background circumstances that’s required in a reverse discrimination case, the court said. He didn’t provide any statistical proof, it said. He also didn’t allege that anyone in management was a minority, and he conceded that, while he was required to change from sneakers into the leather shoes that were part of his uniform, other White employees weren’t reprimanded for being out of uniform, the court said.

Halbauer said requiring him to change into leather shoes was a discriminatory act because he had been medically approved to wear sneakers. But that wasn’t an actionable adverse employment action, because it didn’t affect Halbauer’s salary, benefits, hours, or title, Stivers said. Halbauer also never followed the USPS’s formal process for requesting a job accommodation, the judge said.

The court said Halbauer’s claim also failed because he never raised race discrimination in his internal EEO complaint, and thus didn’t exhaust his pre-suit remedies. The EEO complaint’s reference to the hat incidents was “too attenuated” from race to put the USPS on notice that he was alleging race bias, the court said.

Kenneth J. Henry of Louisville represented Halbauer. The US attorney’s office represented the USPS.

The case is Halbauer v. DeJoy, 2023 BL 230588, W.D. Ky., No. 3:20-cv-00533, 7/6/23.