A group of women seeking $500 million from McDonald’s for allegedly ignoring complaints about workplace sexual harassment have won the chance to enter into the record what they allege is an abundance of internal communications among corporate board members discussing the incidents at the root of their litigation.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Cox issued an order April 18 partially granting the plaintiffs’ motion to compel, another procedural victory for Jamelia Fairley and Ashley Reddick, who sued McDonald’s in April 2020 in Chicago, alleging sexual harassment and retaliation at more than 100 restaurants in Florida. They said the chain “creates and permits a toxic work culture from the very top” and said the company “has long been aware of, and failed to address, this endemic problem.”
Fairley and Reddick, both in their 20s, worked at a McDonald’s in Sanford, Florida. They said that location is one of about 100 restaurants in Florida and 650 nationwide owned and operated by McDonald’s rather than a franchisee. They seek compensatory damages of at least $100,000 per potential class member for infractions dating back to 2016.
In March 2023, the women sought access to documents they called “directly relevant to a central dispute in this case,” that of corporate responsibility. They pointed to a January ruling in Delaware Chancery Court in which David Fairhurst, former chief people officer for McDonald’s, could not win dismissal on shareholder claims of breaching fiduciary duty by failing “to exercise oversight regarding serious and pervasive allegations of sexual harassment at McDonald’s stores,” Cox wrote.
“The Delaware Court found that Fairhurst should have paid attention to and reacted to a series of ‘red flags’ about sexual harassment at the restaurant level, including multiple EEOC charges and strikes protesting sexual harassment by restaurant employees,” the women argued. They also referenced former CEO Stephen Easterbrook as attempting to distance himself legally from daily management of or specific discrimination at any Florida restaurant.
The women said documents central to the Delaware litigation will show “the chief people officer of McDonald’s Corporation, and the Board of Directors of McDonald’s Corporation, had direct responsibility for formulating and enforcing the very policies and procedures regarding sexual harassment that plaintiffs allege are inadequate to prevent and remediate sexual harassment.”
U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama also is assigned to the case. According to Cox’s motion, during a hearing on the motion to compel, a judge expressed skepticism the documents would help the women’s case, suggesting they would not help demonstrate liability as a joint employer and also suggested they were “the kind of general corporate discussions of employment policies deemed insufficient under Seventh Circuit case law to trigger such liability.”
But after reviewing a subset of those documents, Cox found relevancy.
“The Board documents produced to the Court constitute a candid assessment of allegations of sexual harassment at McDonald’s stores throughout the country, which presumably include the stores in this case even if they are not specifically mentioned,” Cox wrote. “The documents further set out both the need for a remediation program and the steps that should be taken throughout McDonald’s stores to better investigate, address and prevent sexual harassment. The implication of these documents is that McDonald’s recognized that it had a problem throughout its stores and that it also believed the problem should be addressed at the corporate level.”
Whether Valderrama ultimately finds evidence of corporate control of employees at Florida stores sufficient to establish Title VII liability remains to be seen, Cox wrote, but many of the documents “are clearly relevant to that issue.”
However, Cox said documents discussing specifics of Easterbrook and Fairhurst leaving the company are irrelevant to the litigation and the company won’t be required to give such information to the women in this case. She also gave McDonald’s an extra 30 days for discovery the company deems “necessary to rebut any implication of joint control these documents might suggest.”
The women are represented in the case by attorneys Douglas M. Werman, Maureen A. Salas and Sarah J. Arendt, of the firm of Werman Salas, of Chicago; and by Eve H. Cervantez and Nicole Collins, of Altshuler Berzon, of San Francisco.
McDonald's is defended by attorney Elizabeth Bethea McRee and others with the firm of Jones Day, of Chicago.