Restaurant Chain Sued for Discriminating Against Worker with
Mental Retardation
by Dave Reynolds, Inclusion Daily Express

February 9, 2001
CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE--Jody Terrio, 35, loved his
dishwashing job at the Olive Garden. And he did his job well,
consistently scoring four out of five possible points in his job
performance reviews, beginning from the time he joined the Concord
branch when it opened in 1994.

But in 1997 something changed. "I don't work today," Terrio would
say in the mornings. He started "throwing temper tantrums" at work.

Finally, he was fired. It was the first and only time the man, who has
mental retardation, was let go from a job.

The firing didn't seem right to Terrio's mother, Sandy Segil. "The only
thing I was told was that he was becoming unmanageable, that he
was having temper-tantrums, that they couldn't deal with it," Segil said.

So she asked Sheila Zakre, an attorney at the Disabilities Rights
Center, to look into things.

What Zakre found has led the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission to file its first New Hampshire workplace disability
discrimination and harassment lawsuit on Wednesday.

By interviewing Olive Garden employees, Zakre found that Terrio
had endured a daily barrage of physical and verbal abuse while he
worked there. Coworkers called him offensive names, put him in
head-locks and other painful wrestling moves -- even pulled his
sweatpants down in front of a crowd.

Sometimes they would hide Terrio's bicycle, or push him to work
faster, apparently just to watch him fly into a rage.

"The seemed to think it was fun to get him going," Segil told the
Concord Monitor.

The suit claims that management did little to intervene, but instead
fired him when his work performance dropped. The lawsuit seeks
back wages and punitive damages. It also seeks a change in Olive
Garden's employment policy to eliminate future disability-based
harassment.

The case could become more significant because it is one of a
handful filed on behalf of employees with mental retardation. Only
79 of the 23,000 disability discrimination charges filed in 1998
were related to such workers.

"One of the goals of this lawsuit would be to establish precedent
on this," said EEOC trial attorney Markus Penzel.
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Sent to this list by:
Dave Reynolds, Editor
Inclusion Daily Express/Inclusion Weekly Review
Disability Rights Email News Service
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