CONFIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM
To: Kris Dickinson, CEO Dunder Mifflin Inc. From: Mukesh Patel, Director of Human Resources, Dunder Mifflin
Date: April 30, 2018, 6:00 pm
Subject: Regarding discrimination and harassment complaints at the Scranton office.
Dear Sir,
Recently, I started as the Director of Human Resources for Dunder Mifflin, Inc. a middle-market paper company. I began to hear of roaring about discrimination and harassment complaints at the Scranton office. Then I started an investigation into the discrimination and harassment. First of all, there are two harassment prevention seminars organized at the Scranton office in the past two years, both of which have been delivered by a third party, Diversity Inc. The seminar was organized around…show more content… As the camera moves between groups, I observe individuals using offensive accents and relating negative stereotypes about the race or nationality on their partner’s forehead. Everyone is offended. This is also when Michael gets slapped by Kelly Kapoor. If someone decided to sue Dunder Mifflin over this, would they win?
The conduct here was clearly based on a protected category or categories, race and/or nationality, so a potential plaintiff would have that going for them. Courts, however, generally require the conduct to be more severe or pervasive than what I see in this episode. For instance, there are lots of cases where racial epithets have been directed at an employee on a limited or isolated basis, and courts have held that the conduct was not sufficiently severe to be legally actionable. The diversity training was a one-off incident.
If, for instance, Michael held this diversity training exercise on a regular basis and this conduct continued over a long period of time, a court may find actionable harassment. A court may also find for a plaintiff if the racially-charged language was accompanied by some kind of physically threatening
