BLACK HISTORY MONTH Leader of victorious suit tells of taking on Texaco

Witnesses, documentation and the right law firm are keys to success, speaker says.
By PETER H. MILLIKEN
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Perseverance is necessary for anyone planning to file a civil rights lawsuit against an employer, according to the lead plaintiff in the suit that won the second largest racial discrimination settlement in U.S. history.
"The fortitude, the time, the commitment, the sacrifice are things you have to weigh first," said Bari-Ellen Roberts, leader of a class action suit by 1,400 black Texaco employees. "You don't know what you're doing until [the employers] start fighting back," she said.
The suit, which achieved a $176 million settlement in 1996, was surpassed only by a $192 million settlement by Coca-Cola last year, Roberts told a Black History Month lecture audience Wednesday at Youngstown State University.
The keys to winning
Among the keys to prevailing in such a lawsuit are documenting, and having witnesses to, the alleged acts of discrimination and selecting the right law firm to handle a case in this very specialized area of the law, Roberts said.
"The biggest hurdle for most people in filing a lawsuit against their employer, after the documentation, is finding the right law firm," to represent them against an organization with a well-funded legal defense, she said.
Most people can't afford to pay a lawyer enough "to sustain a suit that's going to last several years at best," she observed. Many plaintiffs experience nervous breakdowns, or other health problems or family pressure to terminate the legal action, she said. Plaintiffs win less than 4 percent of civil rights lawsuits, she estimated.
Roberts, a workplace diversity consultant who lives in Phoenix, told of the apathy, denial and fear expressed by her co-workers after she filed the suit, the threatening phone calls she received and vandalism that was done to her car, which had racial slurs written on it.
"When you dare to do something, you dare to do it alone," said Roberts, who continued as a senior financial analyst at Texaco until the settlement was reached. "I felt that I had to fight Texaco at Texaco. The information I needed was at Texaco," she explained. "All I wanted was justice," she said.
After leaving Texaco, Roberts wrote the book, "Roberts vs. Texaco: The True Story of Race in Corporate America," published in 1998 by Avon Books, New York.
About the lawsuit
The suit, filed in 1994, alleged that the White Plains, N.Y.-based company passed over black employees deserving promotions and paid them less than white workers in comparable jobs. In addition to being passed over for promotions, Roberts said she was being paid 15 percent to 25 percent less than white men reporting to her and 33 percent less than her peers.
She recalled how the federal lawsuit, which had been pending for two years, was settled after the release of audiotapes of meetings in which company executives maligned black employees and spoke of altering or destroying company documents that might hurt Texaco's defense in the case.
After contents of the tapes were published in the national media, Texaco's stock price plummeted; major investors threatened to divest and civil rights leaders condemned the company, she said.
When the case was settled, she said, on average, each black employee received between $100,000 and $150,000, and the company agreed to cooperate with a court-supervised task force to oversee its diversity program.