The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a former Statesville grocery store butcher who claims he was fired because of his ethnicity.
According to a lawsuit filed Monday by the EEOC, Robert Bruce was terminated from his job as a meat-cutter at the Compare Foods store on West Front Street because he is not Hispanic.
In a release issued by the EEOC, Bruce claims his race — as a "non-Hispanic, white American" — was at the root of his being let go by the store.
Ray Hosseini, the manager of the Statesville Compare Foods, denied any wrongdoing. He said he remembered Bruce's his brief stay at the store. "I knew he left, but I don't know what happened," Hosseini said.
Walk into any of the Compare Foods grocery stores in the area and you are likely to notice rather quickly that Spanish is the predominant language spoken there.
It's not by accident, necessarily.
The chain of stores, which now numbers about 50, was founded by a family from the Dominican Republic and caters, largely, to a Latino clientele.
Hosseini said Latinos are attracted to the store because it carries foods popular in the Hispanic community.
"About half of what we have is limited," he said. "And no other stores have it."
While a business is free to find a niche customer base, it cannot hire and fire in a discriminatory fashion.
And, according to EEOC attorney Lynette A. Barnes, that is what happened in this case.
Barnes said the Compare Foods location in Charlotte settled a lawsuit earlier this year, which made allegations similar to those found in the Statesville case. That case involved three "non-Hispanic employees," all of whom worked in the store's meat department.
"It is unlawful for employers to fire or otherwise discriminate against qualified employees simply because a company wants to employ workers of a different race or nationality," Barnes said. "Employment decisions must be made on merit and the ability to do the job."
Manuel Pena, the owner of a Compare Foods store in Winston-Salem and a member of the family that owns many of the Compare Foods stores, said that while it is true that the stores hire a large number of Hispanic workers, that is due to the fact that most of the applicants are from Latin American countries.
"But we would rather have English-speaking employees," he said. "Our goal is to have people from all over."
Pena said he would "never fire anyone" because they were not Hispanic.
But Bruce claims that is exactly what happened.
According to the EEOC news release, Bruce had been employed as a meat-cutter by Galaxy Foods at 1314 W. Front St.
When that store was purchased by Compare Foods, they kept Bruce on for about four months and then fired him — in March 2006 — at which time he was "replaced by a lesser qualified Hispanic employee."
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