Prime Agrees to Pay $3.11 Million to Settle EEOC Case
Truckload carrier Prime Inc. concluded its 15-year legal battle with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by agreeing to pay more than $3.11 million in compensatory damages and back pay in a civil case concerning driver training and allegations of sexual harassment.
Both parties announced the conclusion of the litigation in press releases May 31, with the federal agency hailing a consent decree that results in, “Women who were denied jobs will now be compensated and have the opportunity to be hired,” EEOC General Counsel David Lopez said.
Prime called the document a “settlement” and the result of an August 2014 U.S. District Court decision that “disagreed with Prime’s interpretation” of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The agreement by the two parties derailed a jury trial that was supposed to start in January. The case was concluded with a May 26 order from Judge M. Douglas Harpool of the district court’s Springfield, Missouri, division.
While this case was filed in 2011, the issue started in 2001. Prime was sued that year by three women alleging sexual harassment when they were driver trainees, with the harassment coming from men who were driver trainers for Prime, which ranks No. 21 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of largest for-hire carriers.
As a result, Prime changed its training program in 2004 so that men trained men and women trained women. The company said same-sex training was a legitimate exception to Title VII because of the unique nature of longhaul trucking.
Longhaul “is not like any other industry when it comes to training drivers,” Prime’s Brooke Mosley said. “Prime considered factors unique to the trucking industry and to the circumstances of trainers and trainees in an over-the-road training environment, such as being on the road for weeks at a time … spending extended periods of time in the confined space of a truck cab; living on the truck; changing clothes on the truck; sleeping on the truck; and, in some instances, using portable toilets on the truck.”
Mosley is a training specialist and the female driver liaison for Prime.
EEOC filed a second suit against Prime in 2011, saying there were so few female driver trainers available, women had “to wait extended periods of time, sometimes up to 18 months, for a female trainer to become available, which resulted in most female driver trainees being denied employment,” the agency said.
Prime said it “respectfully disagreed with the court’s ruling” on same-gender training but accepted the ruling and abandoned the training policy.
Additional coverage of this topic appears in the June 6 print edition of Transport Topics
