A hotel dishwasher identified as 60-year-old Marie Jean Pierre, has been granted $21m after being forced to work on Sundays, and fired after missing work on Sundays for religious reasons.
The hotel dishwasher who worked with Conrad Miami Hotel for more than a decade until she was fired in March 2016, was a devout Christian missionary born in Haiti. According to her, she was fired by her boss at the hotel after she missed six Sundays from work to attend Bethel Baptist Church in Miami.
Pierre who filed the lawsuit in 2017 citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against her former workplace, previously managed by Hilton, alleged in the lawsuit that she told the Conrad Miami when she started the job that due to her religion, she couldn’t work on Sundays.
She told the hotel she would need to resign in 2009 after they scheduled her to work on a Sunday, and the hotel subsequently met her requests to avoid working on Sundays until 2015 so she wouldn’t leave, per the lawsuit.
The jury in federal court who ruled on the case on Tuesday, granted her $21 million in damages, plus $35,000 in back wages and $500,000 for emotional pain and mental anguish.
“They accommodated her for seven years, and they easily could have accommodated her, but instead of doing that, they set her up for absenteeism and threw her out,” her attorney Marc Brumer said. .
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“She’s a soldier of Christ. She was doing this for all the other workers who are being discriminated against.”