NJ Transit recently settled a $3.65 million racial discrimination lawsuit with seven former African American employees, who cited racial insults from supervisors as the cause for legal action.
In January 2014, accusations surfaced after a supervisor, no longer employed by the agency, put a makeshift noose around an employee’s neck and boasted, “This is how things were handled in the South.” The same supervisor was also accused of using a racial slur in a professional setting.
Attorneys reported incidents of unfair treatment from the supervisors, as well as unequal pay compared to the defendants’ white colleagues. Other charges are also included within the multimillion-dollar settlement. The plaintiffs reported they were never properly informed about receiving pay increases because of freezes on merit raises, and white co-workers being reclassified by NJ Transit to a position that bypassed the freeze on merit increases. One employee mentioned that “non-African-American colleagues received considerable larger pay increases despite no change in their responsibilities.”
