Monge v. Beebe Rubber Co.

Here, the plaintiff worked for the defendant in a union shop and she joined the union as a requirement for her employment. After working without incident for a few months, the plaintiff applied to work a different position for higher pay. The plaintiff’s foreman told her that if she wanted the job, she would have to be nice. The plaintiff got the job. Subsequently, the foreman asked her out and she refused. Following this, the plaintiff’s personnel manager visited her at home about some annoying phone calls the plaintiff was receiving, and during that visit, the manager told the plaintiff he knew that the foreman used his position to make advances at female employees under his authority, and asked the plaintiff “not to make trouble.” After that, only three weeks after having worked in the new position, her machine was shut down, her overtime was taken away (even though no one else’s was), and she had to return to a position at a lower salary. The foreman continued to harass plaintiff in various ways, eventually firing her for refusing to comply an order at the very moment she was making a complaint to the union steward. After she was reinstated, the plaintiff was fired yet again when she called in sick over a period of time. The plaintiff did not file a claim for hostile working environment upon her termination. However, she did sue for breach of her employment contract. The plaintiff was an at-will employee. The court noted that in order to find termination was improper, the plaintiff would need to show that the termination was motivated by bad faith or malice. The court noted that the facts of the case—in particular, the foreman’s overtures, manipulation of assignments, and the connivance of the personnel manager, all supported the jury’s conclusion that termination was maliciously motivated and thus improper. Thus, even though the plaintiff did not sue for sexual harassment, she was able to use the harassment to show she was maliciously terminated from her job.