A former manager at Baltimore’s Department of Public Works has filed a civil lawsuit against the city, alleging rampant racial discrimination and retaliation for speaking about unfair and unsafe working conditions.
WJZ Investigates obtained her lawsuit, which you can read here.
The allegations
Linda Batts, the first Director of Equity for Baltimore’s Department of Public Works, is blowing the whistle on what she calls a “racially hostile” workplace with “inhumane working conditions” for employees including those who pick up the trash.
“They were subjected to retaliation, more aggressive surveillance in the workplace, alienation and blackballing by their colleagues and coworkers and eventually termination. This kind of mistreatment, illegal treatment, breeds nothing but a chilling effect,” Batts said in a news conference outside city hall Monday.
She told WJZ, “These employees, almost universally though working in two different departments, characterized their working environment as severely hostile, retaliatory, akin to a pre-Emancipation Proclamation, colonial plantation-type environment where the overseer scrutinized their every move.”…