Reference no: EM132253490

Catherine Van Order is a manager at National Eagle’s hangar at the Miami International Airport. The hangar’s workforce consists of eighty mechanics, including a small number of African Americans, Latinos, and white ex-strikers from Western Air Lines who are earning half as much as they earned from their old employer. National Eagle is struggling to regain the public’s confidence after two of its planes suffered fatal crashes. Although the airline is downsizing in two other southern cities, it wants to increase its business to Latin America and the Caribbean, so it has hired more staff at the Miami airport. Workers are assigned heavy workloads at low pay and must work with aging equipment in run-down facilities, leading to a great deal of tension at the Miami airport hangar.

Employees have tried to ease the tension by playing practical jokes on each other and making wisecracks. These jokes have included sexual and ethnic jokes along with comments about people’s appearance, including weight, and their religion. Employees posted cartoons depicting black mechanics as gorillas or starving Somalis on the bulletin board. When Van Order suggested to one of the mechanics that the joking was getting out of control, he told her that people were just making fun of stereotypes and that nobody was trying to be personally offensive to their coworkers.

Although no employees complained to her about the joking, Van Order issued a memo setting forth the company’s policy on discrimination and harassment. Several employees then told her that the memo had affected morale; without the joking, workers seemed tense and anxious, and were less productive. Within several weeks, the joking commenced again and escalated when a poster of a black basketball player with a mop on his head and a watermelon in his hand was posted in the locker room. After this incident, Van Order spoke to several African American workers about it, but they seemed reluctant to talk. She sensed that they were quiet for fear of either losing their jobs or becoming victims of hostile treatment by their coworkers.

What should Van Order do?