Employee Suits
by Jacob Monty

FORMER EMPLOYEE MOWS EL TORO OUT OF $30,475,000

A jury returned a verdict of $30,475,000 against the Toro Company for terminating long-term employee Steven Jones allegedly in retaliation for filing a workers' compensation claim.

For fifteen years, Steven Jones worked as a process technician for Toro Company. While repairing faulty equipment at the Toro plant, hot plastic escaped from a machine and landed onto his hand, severely burning it. He filed a workers' compensation claim the same day, and Toro terminated Mr. Jones the day after.

Subsequently, Mr. Jones filed suit against Toro alleging that he was terminated in retaliation for filing a workers' compensation claim. Toro argued that it terminated him for failing to take a drug test the day he got injured. However, Mr. Jones' attorney provided evidence that demonstrated that numerous Toro employees who had been injured in the past and did not take drug tests were not fired.

On November 1, 2001, an El Paso, Texas jury returned a verdict in favor of Mr. Jones and awarded him $25,000.00 for past-lost benefits, $150,000 for future-lost benefits, and $300,000 in damages for mental anguish. Additionally, the jury awarded Mr. Jones $30 million in punitive damages. Needless to say, if Mr. Jones had signed a mandatory arbitration agreement, no arbitrator would have levied millions of dollars of punitive damages against Toro.

Notwithstanding the recent Supreme Court decision in EEOC v. Waffle House, which allows the EEOC to seek victim-specific relief despite the presence of an arbitration agreement between an employer and employee, mandatory arbitration agreements are still a preferred avenue to avoid juries from awarding outrageous punitive damages. The Waffle House decision only affects those cases in which the EEOC decides to litigate. Remember EEOC litigates only 1% of all job bias cases filed with the agency. In most cases, it issues employees a right to sue notice empowering the employee to bring lawsuits against the company. The Waffle House decision will not affect 99% of all employment litigation cases.

Indeed, there are several advantages of arbitration over litigation:

• Qualified decision makers decide the cases, not jurors who are themselves employees;
• Reasonable awards that do not include outrageous punitive damages; and
• Speedy resolutions that do not take years to resolve.

Since the average jury award exceeds one million dollars, the bulk of which is punitive damages, it makes sense to have an employee sign a mandatory arbitration agreement, which will take the decision out of the jury's hands and place it in the hands of an arbitrator.

Remember Texas Restaurant Association members can implement a mandatory arbitration agreement program (English/Spanish) for a flat fee of $420.00.