Pa. chocolate company responds to hiring bias suit

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A woman has sued a chocolates-and-milkshake shop, saying she was fired for hiring a black woman instead of a white, “all-American girl.”

Officials with Edward Marc Chocolatier, which does business as The Milk Shake Factory on the city’s South Side, didn’t address the specific claims made in the federal lawsuit filed today by 43-year-old Denise Beloncis, but they said they believe the litigation will be “successfully resolved.”

The Pittsburgh woman said she was fired in November 2012, about three months after she was hired as the store’s general manager.

The plaintiff claims a supervisor specifically told her not to hire men and to hire “the all-American girl,” which the lawsuit described as blonde, blue-eyed and college-educated — preferably at Duquesne University, a Catholic school in the city.

Beloncis’ attorney, Sam Cordes, said she was fired when she instead hired a young black woman.

“As a nation we have determined that a person should not pay a price for opposing race or sex discrimination,” Cordes said. “Here, the price Ms. Beloncis paid for doing the right thing was her job. The law does not allow an employer to charge that kind of price.”

According to the company’s website, the family-owned business was founded about 90 years ago by immigrants who have passed down recipes for handcrafted chocolates that the founders “carried with them from the family kitchen back in Greece.”