When a supervisor allegedly made caustic remarks to a quality control manager named John (not his real name), it led to a series of events that were bad for the Army combat veteran hired to work in Albany, N.Y., and his employer, Kiewit Power Constructors.
John filed a federal lawsuit in 2024 accusing the supervisor and Kiewit of violating anti-discrimination laws protecting veterans and the disabled. The case is still in the preliminary stages but it reflects some workplace complications that surround a supervisor’s manner of dealing with staff and the sensitivities needed with people who have disabilities.
Similar workplace discrimination lawsuits have erupted involving other employees with special disabilities, such as a recent case involving Terracon and a Gen Z engineer.
Kiewit Power Constructors, the defendant in John’s lawsuit, is owned by a Kiewit Corp. subsidiary.
According to the complaint, John’s 2004 deployment in Iraq involved firefights and other combat scenarios that eventually caused trauma making him unable to perform his duties and eventually led to his discharge in December 2005. The following years saw John unable to work, experiencing “housing instability,” and he eventually received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, he stated.
In 2022, John began a $124,000-a-year job as a quality manager for Kiewit Power Constructors, first in Kansas and then the next year in Albany. His manager in Albany, John alleged, first gave him the silent treatment but then began making caustic comments and insults that included John’s weight and even that he used medication to treat his PTSD.
The comments targeted John’s “struggles with mental health and related disabilities,” said his complaint.
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In 2024 another quality control specialist reported the allegedly discriminatory comments directed to or about John to the unit’s human resources director, his complaint alleges. Instead of disciplining the supervisor, John’s managers brought up the subject of transferring John to another city, John’s complaint stated. He was subsequently given a transfer to Texas, cutting him off from family and home in New York, and resigned instead, he claimed.
That forced resignation qualified under law as a “constructive discharge,” John claimed, a term often used to describe when an employee is given a change that forces a resignation. And he claimed that action and his other treatment violated the American with Disabilities Act and New York State Human Rights Law.
Kiewit: Claims Don’t Measure Up
In August Kiewit sought to knock out much of the lawsuit in a partial motion to dismiss, arguing that it failed to state a claim under the various laws involved, including those related to retaliation and constructive discharge.
The remarks made by John’s supervisor were neither frequent nor severe enough to qualify as harassment under the law or as a hostile work environment—another widely used legal standard in such matters.
Also, the alleged harassment was not directed at a condition that “qualified as an ADA disability,” Kiewit argued. John also failed to exhaust his administrative remedies available to him within Kiewit for his ADA hostile work environment claim, Kiewit stated.
Federal court records show no response yet on the motion to dismiss, with the last court filing in the case made in December.