A senior manager at Black Amazon and a former economic policy adviser to Senator Cory Booker is suing the tech giant and two of its current executives for alleged race and gender discrimination and for allegedly violating the Equal Pay Act, according to one lawsuit opened in district court in Washington, DC, on Monday. The lawsuit also alleges that a former Amazon executive harassed and sexually assaulted her.
Charlotte Newman, a senior manager who has worked at the company’s Amazon Web Services division since January 2017, told Recode in an interview that the discrimination started when she was first hired at a lower level for a public policy manager role in the company. that she applied for. – and what she believes her qualifications warrant.
She said that discrimination continued when she was denied a promotion for more than a year, although she was performing aspects of a more senior role and had started to pressure her manager to assign her to a higher level. She was elevated to a senior manager position in the fall of 2019, more than two and a half years after being hired. Newman said what made it worse was that her first boss, an AWS director named Steve Block, employed what she believed to be racial stereotypes when telling her that her communication style was “very straightforward” and “just scary” and that she “can intimidate people.”
Some of the alleged actions that Newman said were the most painful involve a former AWS director, Andres Maz, a senior colleague who sometimes assigned work to Newman. Newman claims that Maz has sexually harassed her on several occasions, including proposing sex. The complaint also accuses Maz of sexual assault, including squeezing her lap near her genitals and groping her thigh under a table at a work dinner and, on a later occasion, pulling on her long braided hair when she tried to leave for a post walk. -job.
“There has been a deep emotional pain,” said Newman in an interview with Recode. “All the hard work, all the sacrifices I made, my education – none of that saved me from someone who is a predator and lives in fear of what else he could do.”
A third AWS executive, a vice president named Shannon Kellogg, who was Newman’s manager after Block, allegedly relied on Maz’s feedback in his judgment of Newman’s performance, thereby helping to create a work environment in which Newman felt unable to report sexual harassment to their managers for fear of retaliation. The suit also claims that Kellogg and Block “often complained about the personality of other employees, which is not a common practice for men under their supervision”.
Amazon spokesman Doug Stone did not immediately respond to a request for comment on behalf of the company, Block and Kellogg. Maz could not be reached for comment and a lawyer who probably represented him did not immediately return messages requesting comment.
Newman’s lawsuit was opened after Recode published an investigation last week that detailed Amazon employees’ claims that black corporate workers face prejudice and an uneven playing field, where they receive lower performance ratings than their non-peers. black and are promoted less often. Newman said the Recode report was one of the reasons why she decided to speak publicly about her experience.
“I firmly believe that Amazon should take advantage of the light of diversified leadership, rather than dim the light of black employees and other black employees,” said Newman. “For years I was suffering in silence, [but] I am sure that many people now feel better able to add their voices to the story, and I hope that some real change will occur. ”
Newman said Recode’s investigation resonated for many reasons, including details of an Amazon hiring practice that some employees call “downgrade” – or “downgrade”, as his lawsuit refers to it. All 10 Black Amazon employees interviewed for the report told Recode that they or a black colleague they know was hired at a lower level than they believe their qualifications warrant.
“It is not uncommon for women, and especially black women, to have an advertised role on one level, but to extend an offer in a position that is inferior,” former Amazon diversity manager Chanin Kelly-Rae told Recode in the investigation. A spokesman for Amazon said earlier that demotion is common, but that the practice occurs with candidates from all backgrounds.
Newman says she was surprised by Amazon’s original job offer at the lower level, but accepted it due to the explanation that the scope of her work would be limited to “Level 6” responsibilities – in particular, that the job would only require that she doing political work with a focus on the US Newman said he was also unaware of the claims of other Amazonians that demotion can happen more often for black women. Before joining Amazon, Newman, a Harvard Business School graduate, worked for three years for Booker, advising the New Jersey senator on economic policy issues. She has worked for three other members of Congress, all of whom served on the Chamber’s Financial Services Committee.
But after an interview with a senior manager role in the AWS public policy division – Level 7 in the Amazon hierarchy – which would include work in both North and South America, she was finally offered a position with a focus on in the USA at Level 6. In a few months, however, she says she was assigned to projects outside the United States. Newman said she finally realized that several of her level 6 white colleagues had less work experience than she did and did not have graduate degrees, and one of them allegedly received a promotion to level 7 shortly after being hired. The lawsuit claims that the leveling error cost Newman millions, with the difference in compensation between levels growing exponentially, as stock premiums make up a significant part of Amazon’s payment packages, and Amazon’s stock price has increased rapidly in recent years.
“After I went in and talked to other people about their experiences, I started to hear that there was a view that black employees, other underrepresented employees and women were more often demoted,” she said.
Even after saying that he began to experience sexual harassment, Newman said he did not report it because he said Maz had not yet touched her and feared that it would jeopardize his new career at the company. After Maz allegedly touched her the following year and made proposals to her, she changed the way she traveled for business trips and when and where she worked at the company’s Washington offices. She says she wanted to avoid being caught alone with Maz, who was sometimes responsible for designating her job as an older colleague, although she was not her official manager.
In June 2020, when the pandemic meant Newman could work from home – and had time to face his experience – and as the United States began to experience a new assessment of racial inequality after police deaths of black Americans, including Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, she decided she was tired of being quiet. She filed internal complaints detailing her allegations of harassment and assault by Maz and the discrimination she says she suffered on Amazon.
Amazon conducted an investigation and ended up terminating Maz’s job and required Block to undergo training, according to the lawsuit. But for several months between the time she lodged her internal complaints and knowledge of the outcome of the investigation, Newman said that she should attend virtual meetings in the presence of Maz.
“At the very least, Amazon could have better safeguards to protect employees,” she said. “A company the size of Amazon should have clear guidelines on what happens if you report, hear what your rights are … [and] make sure that, after reporting, you don’t need to be contacted by the person who harassed you. “
At the end of last year, Newman was moved to a new role in a division other than AWS because he feared retaliation from his superiors for the complaint. She said she told company representatives that the only way to consider staying at Amazon for the long term is if the company makes some significant changes to its hiring and diversity programs, including banning or significantly altering the “downgrade” practice to fix employee complaints that it is a racially prejudiced process.
Newman is represented by Douglas H. Wigdor, a high-profile labor lawyer who represented six of the women who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual abuse, as well as more than 20 former Fox News employees in sexual harassment and racial discrimination cases against the network . He also represented Tara Reade, the former employee of the then Sen. Joe Biden, who in 2019 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993.
Wigdor said his current client declined any deal with Amazon that would prevent her from talking about her experience.
“As one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world, Amazon has a moral obligation to lead by example and promote a level playing field for all workers,” he said in a statement. “Unfortunately, however, Amazon treats its black employees as second-class citizens … Because of Ms. Newman’s bravery, we hope that other black employees and former Amazon employees now have a voice in facing this discrimination and no longer suffer. in silence.”