A former white manager is suing Starbucks claiming the company discriminated against her after the backlash in which two men were arrested and the video sparked an outcry on social media.
In a newly filed federal lawsuit, Shannon Phillips, who led Starbucks’ retail operations in southern New Jersey for 13 years, the Philadelphia region, Delaware, and parts of Maryland, says she had nothing to do with the arrests of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson.
Phillips says she had been praised for her “exceptional” performance, had received a bonus a month before she was fired, and was on track for a promotion to a position with Starbucks’ government and community affairs unit until the arrests.
Phillips is suing Starbucks for loss of earning capacity, benefits, “pain and suffering, embarrassment, humiliation, loss of self-esteem, mental anguish, and loss of life’s pleasures.
Still, she says, she was terminated less than a month after the incident because she objected to placing the white district manager at the 18th and Spruce Streets store on administrative leave for purportedly paying lower salaries to black workers than their white counterparts.
Phillips now alleges that in an effort to do extreme damage control, the company went after its white employees.
Phillips claims that a month after the arrests, Starbucks forced her to suspend a 15-year “white employee (who had not had any involvement in the arrests)” for “an allegation of discriminatory conduct” that she knew to be false.
In a meeting between the former employee and her superiors, Phillips was told her colleague allegedly paid non-white employees more than white employees. Despite providing information to refute the “factually impossible” allegations, the lawsuit states, Phillips was “ignored.” The lawsuit insists the allegations were baseless since Starbucks store managers do not determine employee salaries.
The day after the meeting, Phillips says she was called into a meeting to “negotiate her separation package as she was being terminated.
In 2018 two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson who was arrested at a Starbucks in downtown Philadelphia and were accused of trespassing. They said they were there for a business meeting that they had hoped would change their lives. Later, Starbucks announced in a statement that it will close more than 8,000 company-owned stores across the nation for the afternoon of May 29 to train its staff on how to avoid “racial bias” in an effort to prevent “discrimination in our stores.”
