A local church fired a whistleblower for reporting unsanitary conditions and now must pay $30,000.
A nutrition specialist at a local Dallas childcare facility run by New Mount Zion Baptist Church accused the church of wrongful termination. The church fired the employee after raising concerns about rodents, insects, spiders, and rodent droppings in the kitchen and cafeteria.
Food safety worsened when an air conditioner broke during the summer and was not promptly repaired.
The employee filed a complaint with the Dallas County Health Department (DCHD) on August 26, 2021. A Health Inspector arrived at the childcare facility the same day to inspect conditions, and New Mount Zion fired the employee on August 27, 2021.
The U.S. Department of Labor notified New Mount Zion of a complaint made for wrongful termination in September 2021, according to a recent press release. The allegation was then investigated by the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
New Mount Zion wrongfully terminated the employee in “an attempt to silence” the employee and “send a message to other employees not to complain,” OSHA concluded.
The Labor Department has ordered the church to reinstate the employee and compensate them with $11,000 in back pay, interest, and $20,000 in additional damages “for pain and suffering, including emotional, financial, and mental distress.”
The church was also ordered not to make “negative references” about the whistleblower “to any prospective future employers” and to “not retaliate or discriminate” against the employee “in any manner.”
Eric S. Harbin, OSHA’s regional administrator in Dallas, said, “New Mount Zion Baptist Church’s actions toward the employee are unacceptable and deeply concerning.”
“The existence of rodents and insects in food preparation and serving areas poses a health hazard,” he continued. “The employee had the legal right to express apprehensions about the unhygienic surroundings and should not have been fired for doing so.”
The Dallas Express reached out to New Mount Zion for comment and received a response that the church’s attorney could provide a statement. The Dallas Express then contacted the attorney, but he did not respond by press time.
I understand that kind of work environment, but I am sure that other employees quietly supported the whistleblower. I know about blowing the whistle on that kind of stuff.
The Plano, Texas (Legacy) Sprouts Farmers Market had a huge problem with rats about 7 or so years ago. The rat urine odor was so bad that the Regional Manager (Manager over all the Texas area Sprouts stores) moved his office (the office was in the back dock area) out of the Plano store, but the Regional Mgr refused to handle the rats. The now empty office was so rank that some employees would never enter it even when group meetings were held in it. Folks would sit outside the door on folding chairs. Literally, the rats were so bad that occasionally one would fall on a worker, be crawling on the produce, eating into packages of food, and commonly observed scampering in the back room. Some employees would sneak in a BB gun and shoot them overnight. Some of the shelves wreaked with rat urine and feces with packages of food chewed and opened.
Finally, an employee secretly called the Plano Health Department which then threatened an immediate shutdown of the Plano Sprouts. With a big group meeting in the backroom, as the Regional Manager screamed a tirade blaming all the employees about the situation, a rat could be seen on the overhead beam by the entire group. People from other stores were called in to help and Sprouts spent close to a million dollars trying to fix the issue. One story: A guy in a Hazmat suit tore out the wall of the old Regional Manager’s office to find more than 50 live baby rats.
The Regional Manager no longer works for Sprouts. He was a jerk anyway.
“The employee had the legal right..”
True.
So now if you report a wrong, you get fired. Need to also watch those that do not fire the whistleblower but make life miserable after that, assigned to worst details, no promotion even if fully qualified, etc. Such occurrences need to be addressed too.
The employee did the right thing by exposing the truth. The person who did the firing is pathetic.
The church must have thought it was their “Christian” duty to fire an employee for telling the truth. They should be ashamed.
That worker did right by the health of the children of that daycare.
Sadly the Congregation will be the ones that pay!
Why didn’t the city/county just do a surprise inspection? And how did the church learn so quickly of the reporting, unless the employee was blabbing? Seems to me that there should be inspections done regularly on any establishment with a full scale kitchen. It’s disappointing to hear of a church doing something like this. Does it not bother the church officials seeing rat droppings? If I were that person, I’d take the judgement and get another job. How hard is is to get d-Con for the rats? Or get a couple of cats. Geez.
Could also have let it slip to members of the congregation and then they would handle it. Can’t fire the congregation.