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Boeing wins ethnic-bias case

By Shirleen Holt
Seattle Times business reporter

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Lawyers who brought the class-action lawsuit on behalf of 1,850 technical workers and engineers, including some from Afghanistan and Pakistan, said they'll appeal the verdict.

"Due to 9-11 fears, this was not an ideal time for my Afghani, Pakistani, Iranian and other clients to try this case," attorney Harish Bharti said. "Boeing got full advantage of this environment."

Boeing representatives were pleased by the decision but not surprised.

"We've demonstrated that the company has gone to great lengths to be a good place for all employees to work," said spokesman Ken Mercer.

Boeing lawyers said there was no pattern of discrimination in the unusual class of plaintiffs, which labeled workers from Afghanistan and Pakistan as Asian.

"There were no claims in this case from Chinese or Japanese or Koreans or many other Asian groups," Boeing lead attorney Jeffrey Hollingsworth said yesterday.

When broken down by ethnic group, the statistics showed that some minorities in the class were actually paid more than their white counterparts.

None of the seven named plaintiffs, whose ethnicities also include Indian, Filipino, Cambodian and Vietnamese, was in the courtroom yesterday.

Khalil Nouri, the eponymous plaintiff in Nouri v. Boeing, thinks the fact the nine jurors were white contributed to his former employer's win.

"It doesn't work when there's no diversity of jury," he said from his home in Everett.
 
Nouri, a 52-year-old engineer from Afghanistan, did not testify during the trial. Like many of the plaintiffs, his key complaint was that managers gave minorities lower retention ratings, meaning they'd be the first to go in a layoff.

U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik threw out that part of the complaint before the trial.

Plaintiffs also alleged they started at lower salaries than white co-workers and continued to earn less with each percentage-based pay raise. They said managers were given loose rein to decide who would rise in pay grades, and that such subjectivity allowed bias to creep in.

Bharti complained that Lasnik's jury instructions made it impossible for the plaintiffs to win. The judge told jurors to ignore Boeing's business practices unless they were intentionally discriminatory.

"My clients did not have a prayer based on the erroneous jury instruction telling jurors to ignore Boeing's conduct even if Boeing's compensation practices were unfair, incorrect or unwise," Bharti said.

Lasnik still must rule whether Boeing's employment practices adversely affected the class, whether the disparities were intentional or not. This doesn't involve a jury.

If Lasnik finds Boeing's practices had a "disparate impact" on minorities, he could impose penalties against the company. He is expected to make a written ruling Friday.

The trial had been expected to last four weeks, but it took just nine days for both sides to present their cases. The suit was limited to engineers employed from October 1996 to the present, and to technical workers employed from October 1996 to March 2001.

The trial began just days after Boeing partially settled a gender class-action suit involving 28,000 women in the Puget Sound area. Terms of the settlement, which is still being negotiated, will be announced later this month.

Nouri, who now works as a Department of Defense contractor, is looking to the appeal.

"We're going to be defiant all the way," he said. "We have to prove not only to the Boeing company but to the entire society that, look, Boeing was wrong."

Shirleen Holt: 206-464-8316 or sholt@seattletimes.com