Starbucks Settles With Dwarf Fired From Barista Job

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

Starbucks settles with dwarf fired from barista job

AUSTIN, TEXAS | Thu Aug 18, 2011 10:13pm EDT

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug 18 (Reuters) - Starbucks (SBUX.O) has agreed to pay $75,000 to settle a disability discrimination lawsuit brought on behalf of a Texas barista who said she was fired because she was a dwarf.

The global coffee giant agreed to settle with Elsa Sallard, who was fired in 2009 after three days of training at a Starbucks coffee shop in El Paso, Texas, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said on Thursday.

The firm also agreed to provide training on disability issues for all managers and supervisory employees at the firm's El Paso locations.

The commission filed the lawsuit in May. During her training, Sallard, whose stature is small because of dwarfism, offered to use a stool or small stepladder to carry out some of the tasks of preparing orders and serving customers.

Read more: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSN1E77H25Z20110819?irpc=932

[Syrinx]

1. the CEO of Starbucks was on CNN Wednesday night

He claimed to be a Democrat, but didn't really sound like one.

[No Elephants]

4. Maybe he's a New Democrat, then.

[Selatius]

5. All you really need to be a Democrat is party registration papers.

That is all. You don't even have to agree with the party platform.

[w0nderer]

22. yeah and some people are jumping onto the 'democrat' wagon

my former roommates boss is..was considered hardline republican (right wing of the right, almost extreme) under Clinton

a couple of weeks ago i heard he was registered as Democrat
his attitude was 'well i'm not a teapartyist so i must be a democrat'
i started asking him some questions
he's still at the same political place
but all of a sudden instead of being on the right side of rightwing
he's on the outside left side of right wing

talk about spectrum shift in the 10 years i've known him

he doesn't agree with democrats..well new democrats possibly
he just disagrees less with new democrats than he does new 'republicans' / teapartyists

[Chan790]

10. Howard's an old leftie who bought into the cult of his personal celebrity.

They used to call people like that "bourgeois bohemians", except Howard takes it farther than anybody else I've ever known.

He's not just the CEO of the company, he's been told repeatedly that he is to coffee what Steve Jobs is to bleeding-edge technology...a prophet, not merely a man who hostilely took over his friends' coffee company to import his bastardized vision of the coffee service he got as post-collegiate bumming around France and Italy one summer. If you asked him for his opinions on specific issues, you discover that he's to the left of most of us as long as it doesn't personally affect him...He's Howard, how dare we think he's a mere mortal subject to governance like the rest of us. The guy supports fair wages for everybody but his bean farmers and baristas.

At-least, he's self-made and spoiled with entitlement. It's a bit better than being that entitled and having done nothing for the money but circumstance of birth.

[truthisfreedom]

2. Obviously she wasn't suited to be a barista if there was anyone else working in the customer service

area. The stool would be a trip and injury hazard to the other employees, and would be a nuisance that would slow everyone else down. I'm sure there are other jobs she could have performed. They could have offered to let her do something else, then let her go if she refused.

[jmowreader]

21. She would have had to be moved to a higher echelon

like district or region level. At Starbucks store level, EVERYONE in there, from the newest peon to the store manager, does barista duty. And they haul ass back there when it's busy.

People in a rush plus hot liquid plus a trip hazard equal an unsafe work environment...I can just imagine the lawsuit from an employee who tripped over her stool and did a nose-dive into a cup of near-boiling coffee.

What I don't understand is why they hired her in the first place.

[MADem]

3. I am all for inclusive hiring, but come on--that individual was NOT QUALIFIED to do the job.

Unless the company makes extensive/expensive modifications to suit her, she does not have the physical skillset to accomplish the tasks. All of that stepping up/stepping down and moving around her stepstool would interfere with the key requirement of the job, which is speed, speed and more speed. She wouldn't make a good waitress, either. She also wouldn't be too good at restocking shelves at a big box store. Driving a tank, same deal. If they had a drive-thru window and all she did was take orders, she could maybe do that, but her short arms would be problematic when it came to handing stuff over. She's just not right for the work.

You don't hire people in wheelchairs to be lifeguards. You don't hire developmentally delayed people to do computer repair. When people are not qualified for a certain task, that's not a slam--it's just life. That's not to say there isn't plenty of work they can do.

Starbucks big mistake? They hired her in the first place. Those coffee joints are madhouses; people running all over behind the counter--an accident waiting to happen.

There are plenty of jobs that I can't do, either. I'm too damn old and not fit enough. I don't expect accommodation, particularly unreasonable accommodation. That said, Starbucks should have just not hired her.

[IamK]

6. I agree....

the tough part is if they did not hire the person they may have still been sued (but probably would have had the lawsuit dismissed)

[prete_nero]

7. really you guys?

There is a huge difference between NOT being able to do a job and being able to do a job with assistance or modifications.

Someone said they should have offered a different job or modified one. From what the article said they not only did NOT do that but they refused the solution offered by the plaintiff. They said they would use a stool to eliminate height problems. Oh oh but this causes too much of an inconvenience to the other employees!!! (sarcasm) Oh I suppose she can't fix her own food, do her own chores, brush her own teeth etc...no she probably makes due just fine so why wouldn't she be able to make coffee?
In every starbucks I have seen there are two situations. Either they are so slow that only one person is working...thus the stool and any issues related are not there. OR they are busy and have multiple people working. Put her up on a stool and sit her at the register or a machine...unless the space underneath her standing at the register would normally be used to walk like when a full-height person stands...there...anyways...

They not only did NOT try and accomodate in another way they flat out refused to and were then rightfully sued.

Besides you are going to seriously tell me that when they hired her they didn't notice how tall she was?

[prete_nero]

8. clarification

And just to be clear I DO agree that there are some jobs that certain disabilities preclude some from doing. I work at a dispatch center using phones and two way radio a LOT...if you are deaf there is NO way you can do the job, its just the nature of it.

This does not excuse a lack of even trying.

[jerseyjack]

9. I accomodation by using a stool is simple at first glance, but

I have spent hours in OSHA courses. There is about three feet of space behind the counter between the floor between the counter and where the coffee is made -- or whatever is stored there. If the stool was used, they might not have lost that lawsuit but would likely have faced an OSHA fine.

[trud]

11. I guess you wouldn't mind tripping over the stool

How much room do you think there is behind those counters? I'll never be a jockey, what, do you want to require the other jockeys to load up an extra 100 pounds so I can compete?

[Chan790]

12. Really, yes, Having been a S'bux manager.

I'd never have hired her, period. I managed enough years in that company to know that the issue was failure to properly circular-file within the first half-read of the subject line.

That stool is not a workable or reasonable accommodation, there is literally no room behind those counters as designed for anything that does not absolutely have to be there. It represents a serious safety hazard and obstacle to all other employees; it interferes with safe and efficient behind-the-counter operations.

I feel bad for her but in that location there really is no job she can do...if it were a large store in Manhattan they'd have a retail specialist and a partner dedicated to lobby-management at all rush times, but a smaller store has neither. I bent over backwards to keep the people I hired even when they had issues; I had a 62 year old woman who was incapable of any task except register and could not be trained and had an ever-growing list of needed scheduling-accommodations who I held onto for almost two years before she simply reached the point where I had to let her go. And she cried and I said "Annie, I just can't keep someone who can only ring, can't make beverages, whose beverage-compliance certs I've been fudging since I hired her and has only 44 total hours of set-aside work-availability a week and has declined to be P/T, won't work weekends or days beginning with T or past the end of the bus-schedule day or before noon."

Edit: Annie also had a lifting restriction of 15# and couldn't lift her arms above shoulder-height.

[Gormy Cuss]

16. She offered an accommodation. If it had been handled correctly, Starbucks would have either

accepted that accommodation or come up with an alternative. In a court case, all that Starbucks, with its millions to pay legal fees, was required to do was show that any accommodation was unfeasible. That they chose to settle instead suggests to me that either Starbucks was acting in good faith by paying her a handsome sum for the insult, or that the Starbucks lawyers were convinced that this case was unwinnable.

[Chan790]

19. or a third...

that the settlement was less expensive than the cost of litigation. Some fights are not worth having.

[riderinthestorm]

20. $75k is peanuts to Starbucks. They spend more on that for a morning meeting buffet I presume

The settlement is a pittance to make the case go away without anyone expending even an iota of effort.

[MADem]

17. Oh, come on. Even people who don't frequent starbucks regularly know that's a poor

environment for someone who is height challenged, to say nothing of short-armed. The whole job is reaching--reaching up to pull the coffee, reaching to grab cups, reaching to take money over a HIGH counter, reaching to wipe clean the dirty tables, reaching into cases to get pastries for customers--the only way they could accommodate this woman is to make a "short people" starbucks--lower the counters, lower the tables, lower everything. All a stool would do is clutter an already crowded counter area. It wouldn't make the workcenter efficient, and the 'slow' employee would be resented by the rest of the staff, particularly if they are in a tip-splitting scenario.

If a Starbucks is routinely so slow that only one person is working, that place ain't long for the location. They'll close it if it doesn't make a profit. And I imagine the rest of the workers would be awfully pissed if the short worker got the easy shifts or always got the "sit on your ass cashier duty" because of her need for "accommodation." You want the barista job, you have to DO the barista job. And she doesn't have the physical skills to do it.

If you look at what I wrote, I never said they didn't know how tall she was. What I said is that they should not have hired her. Whoever hired her was stupid, trying to overcompensate and pretend, perhaps with an overabundance of faux political correctness, that an obvious defect could be surmounted, when it couldn't without compromising the workcenter. She is not well suited to the work anymore than a guy with no arms or in a wheelchair is suited to the work, simply because of space requirements and the need for SPEED. If they wanted to hire her to work at their corporate HQ, that's one thing, but someone who can't wipe off the standing tables without clomping around with a step stool is just not an EFFICIENT employee. The name of the game is fast turnover at those places, keeping the line moving. The customers want their stuff fast--faster than the fastest server with a long stride who moves quickly, and doesn't need a stool to get up and down, can provide.

Life isn't fair sometimes. Our bodies betray us and deny us our hopes and dreams. Personally, I think if she thinks about it, she can come up with a better hope/dream than being a Starbucks barista.

[Odin2005]

18. Exactly. I know well not to apply for a job that doesn't go well with my Asperger's, for example.

[jberryhill]

13. He took them to Small Claims Court.

[Dreamer Tatum]

14. Well played nt

[lemonskweeza]

15. Fired Dwarf Settlement

No small feat.