Santangelo v. Cork

255 F.Supp.3d 791

Neal SANTANGELO, Plaintiff,

v.CROWN CORK & SEAL USA, INC., and Ken Tutin, Defendants.

No. 14 C 7723

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division.

Signed June 5, 2017

Ruth Irene Major, The Law Offices of Ruth I. Major, PC, Renee Christine Fell, Asonye & Associates, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.

Carol A. Poplawski, Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, P.C., Chicago, IL, for Defendants.

OPINION AND ORDER

SARA L. ELLIS, United States District Judge

Plaintiff Neal Santangelo alleges that his employer, Defendant Crown Cork & Seal USA, Inc. ("Crown Cork"), and his supervisor, Defendant Ken Tutin, fired him because he was 60 years old. Santangelo claims that Crown Cork violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ("ADEA"), 29 U.S.C. § 621 et seq. , and the Illinois Human Rights Act ("IHRA"), 77 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/1–101 et seq. and that Tutin is liable for tortious interference with business relations. Crown Cork and Tutin move for summary judgment [58]. Because Santangelo fails to show all of Crown Cork's reasons for firing him are pretextual and because Santangelo does not present evidence that could convince a reasonable jury that Crown Cork fired him for a discriminatory purpose or that Tutin was motivated by age-based animus, the Court grants Defendants' motion for summary judgment on Santangelo's employment discrimination claims and his tortious interference claim.

BACKGROUND¹

From August 11, 2003 through March 4, 2013, Santangelo was the plant manager at Crown Cork's Alsip, Illinois packaging plant ("Alsip"). Plant manager was the highest ranking managerial employee; Santangelo ran plant operations and oversaw production quality, accounting, and maintenance.

Beginning in 2007, Tutin supervised Crown Cork's six Aerosol Division plants, including Alsip. As supervisor, Tutin evaluated Santangelo's and other plant managers' work performance. Tutin, a former plant manager himself, believed that plant managers hold significant responsibility, and Tutin and Crown Cork expected plant managers to do the job they were asked to do.

Tutin wrote annual reviews of Santangelo's performance (called an "Employee Performance Roadmap").² Reviewing Santangelo's performance in 2007, Tutin noted that Santangelo had a "challenging year in the Alsip plant" and that Alsip "missed an opportunity to post an outstanding result in 2007 due to a lack of attention to detail." Doc. 59 ¶ 8. Tutin also expressed confidence that Santangelo would recover and lead sustained performance in 2008 with "his leadership and interpersonal skills and [by] becoming more personally involved with auditing and follow-up in key areas of control." Id.

Reviewing Santangelo's 2009 performance, Tutin noted that Santangelo needed to continue to show progress in managing a paradigm change at Alsip and that Santangelo excelled at collecting data and identifying problems but often failed to disclose issues or give assignments to employees. Tutin also wrote that Santangelo struggled to adapt even though he was expected to recognize problems and react more quickly moving forward and that Tutin expected Santangelo to transform Alsip into a more robust and flexible group capable of addressing industry challenges.

For Santangelo's performance review in 2010, Tutin wrote that 2010 was a "year of transformation" and implied that Alsip had changed from a plant where there were complaints and excuses for poor performance into a "go to style plant." Id. ¶ 14. In 2010 and before, Santangelo had requested additional work for Alsip to ensure it was operating at maximum capacity and to increase the plant's efficiency variances. Tutin wrote in the review that Santangelo and Alsip showed they were capable and produced "very positive results." Id. ¶ 96. Alsip's efficiencies improvement and Santangelo's improvement with communications and follow-up with his employees impressed Tutin. He also noted that Alsip led in "spoilage reduction, weld leaker reduction, and HFI management metrics."³ Id. Tutin exclaimed for Santangelo: "Nicely done!" Id. Santangelo received a 3.52 KPI rating and achieved a 101.1% results score.

For 2011, Tutin wrote that Santangelo had a solid performance, noted that a corporate-level issue negatively impacted Alsip's overall financial performance, and stated that plant investments had positioned Santangelo and his team for more improvement. Tutin also wrote that "Alsip required little to no division level management intervention ... due to the consistency of performance in operation." Id. ¶ 97. Tutin praised the "[s]trong year!" Id. Santangelo received a 3.6 KPI rating and a 99.2% results score. In his written response to his review, Santangelo wrote that he agreed and accepted that Alsip's "quality output must improve in Assembly by eliminating the waste is [sic] spoilage and generation of HFIs." Id. ¶ 18. Overall, though, in 2011, Alsip had the second lowest percentage of defects held for inspection (0.47%), with 796,692 cans held for inspection out of the 168,175,842 cans Alsip produced. The lowest percentage was 0.40%. The highest was 0.77%.

In 2012, there was a HFI incident at Alsip. Alsip could not ship a batch of cans because some cans were defective. Santangelo used temporary workers to sort the defective cans, reasoning that the temporary labor was cheaper than paying overtime to the employees who made the product, and he avoided asking the regular employees to admit they had produced defective cans. But Tutin emailed Santangelo, explaining that he wanted the employees who created the defective cans to find them. Tutin's underlying message was that he did not want HFIs and that he believed Santangelo was not doing enough in the leadership department to prevent the HFIs in the first place. Santangelo followed Tutin's orders to change who was sorting the cans. Eventually, Tutin came around on the use of temporary workers to sort defective products and began encouraging such work in 2013.

Tutin, who had heard concerns about leadership and management at Alsip, decided to conduct a meeting at Alsip with all employees (an "all-shift" meeting). He brought Katherine McGovern, the Aerosol Division's newly hired HR Manager, with him to Alsip.⁴ McGovern had also received feedback about the management and leadership style at Alsip, which she believed was not healthy and the responsibility of the plant manager, Santangelo.

Tutin and McGovern interviewed Alsip employees on June 28, 2012. McGovern interviewed all the hourly employees but only some upper-level managers who reported to Santangelo. Tutin and McGovern heard complaints about the plant's management, which McGovern believed revolved around Santangelo and the plant superintendent, Rich Rayhill. Tutin told Santangelo that he needed a plan to address the problems or his job was in jeopardy.

Tutin placed Santangelo on a Performance Improvement Plan ("PIP") on July 2, 2012. Tutin and McGovern prepared a memorandum, summarizing the all-shift meeting and themes they thought were problems. The memo identified problems involving poor communication, employee fears of seeking assistance, favoritism, and lack of development training, respect, action plans, and maintenance of key parts. Tutin wrote that he had targeted many of these problems for Santangelo before but had not seen improvement. Tutin ended the memo by stating that if he did not see improvement "on a consistent and sustained basis," then he would change Alsip's leadership, and Santangelo would receive discipline and might be fired. Doc. 59–16 at 32 (Dep. Ex. 105). Santangelo knew that the July 2, 2012 memo was a PIP and that he needed to remedy the issues or face discipline.

Santangelo created a plan to address the PIP's critiques. He emailed the plan to Tutin and then interviewed Alsip's employees. Santangelo learned that Rayhill was the source of many leadership issues. Santangelo believed Rayhill was preventing employees from trusting and respecting Santangelo because the employees believed Rayhill lied to the employees and did not listen to their problems. Santangelo continued to provide monthly reports (he called them "change plan updates," see Docs. 62–7–62–10) to Tutin in August, September, October, and November of 2012.

On July 16, 2012, in an attempt to improve relations at Alsip, Santangelo sent a memo to all Alsip supervisors about the employee issues raised at the all-shift meeting. Santangelo's memo mentioned the same issues as his PIP. Alsip's HR manager, Camille Speeks, bristled at the memo and contacted McGovern.⁵ McGovern told Santangelo to retract his memo, believing he was shirking responsibility by placing the problems identified in his PIP onto the shoulders of his supervisors. She wanted Santangelo to talk to plant supervisors on a one-on-one basis. Santangelo retracted the memo, but he did not conduct the one-on-one meetings.

In August 2012, Alsip had another quality issue. A customer received cans of suspect quality, and Crown Cork agreed to pay for any problems that the cans created. Tutin emailed Santangelo and Rayhill, believing that their poor judgment was to blame. Tutin told Santangelo and Rayhill that they had given Alsip employees the impression that management condoned employees approving defective cans in order to increase production and reach quotas. Tutin thought this exemplified Alsip's problems with communication and quality and its issues with leadership and management. Tutin implored Santangelo to root out the cause of Alsip's quality problem. Santangelo investigated and learned that plant supervisors at Alsip failed to follow standard operating procedures. From then on, Crown Cork's Director of Quality, Doug McFadden, would approve shipping defects, not Alsip management.

In September 2012, Tutin emailed Santangelo a memo discussing Santangelo's change plan update. Tutin reiterated that he wanted Santangelo to improve his leadership and again warned Santangelo he could be dismissed if he did...