Starbucks has been ordered by a federal jury in New Jersey to pay a former employee US$25.6 million (C$33.8 million) in punitive and compensatory damages after determining that she was wrongfully terminated after a 2018 incident.
Shannon Phillips had been employed at Starbucks for 13 years. She started as district manager in 2005 and had been serving as a regional director since 2011.
On April 12, 2018, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson were waiting in a Starbucks in Philadelphia to meet someone. The two Black men were barred from using the bathroom because they had not purchased anything from Starbucks and were told to leave the store.
When they didn’t leave, a store employee called the cops and had them arrested.
These arrests led to nationwide protests against Starbucks in the US, leading to Phillips being fired on May 9 and Starbucks conducting racial sensitivity and bias training across several locations in North America.
The coffee chain also reached a settlement with Nelson and Robinson for US$1 each, granting that it would invest US$200,000 into non-profit programs for students looking into entrepreneurship.
But the matter was far from over for Phillips, who filed a lawsuit against Starbucks in 2019 for wrongfully firing her while not reprimanding the Black employee managing the store where the incident occurred.
She alleged that Starbucks “took steps to punish white employees who had not been involved in the arrests” to sway community sentiments in its favour. Phillips also maintained that she was not involved in the arrests in any way.
“This was all about the appearances, the optics of what they did,” Phillips’ lawyer Laura Mattiacci said in the courtroom, according to Law360. “If Shannon Phillips is Black, does it play out like this? This case is about Starbucks and self-preservation.”
The new court ruling came on June 12, per the legal publication. It states that Phillips’ race played a role in her termination, supporting her claim that she was used as a “sacrificial lamb” by the corporation.
Mattiacci said the company would not have picked a Black staffer because “it would have blown up in their faces.”
Daily Hive contacted Starbucks and was told that it doesn’t have anything to share at this time.
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