Scott v. Sulzer Carbomedics, Inc.

141 F.Supp.2d 154

Deborah SCOTT, Plaintiff, v. SULZER CARBOMEDICS, INC., Mark Hamlet and Robert White, Defendants.

No. C.A. 98-10711-NG.

United States District Court, D. Massachusetts.

May 15, 2001.

As Amended June 21, 2001.

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Matthew Cobb, Law Firm of Matthew Cobb, Boston, MA, for Deborah Scott, Plaintiff.

Lisa J. Damon, Brigitte M. Duffy, Seyfarth Shaw, Boston, MA, for Sulzer Carbomedics, Inc., Robert White, Mark Hamlet, Defendants.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

GERTNER, District Judge.

The plaintiff, Deborah Scott ("Scott"), brings this action against the defendants, Sulzer Carbomedics, Inc. ("Sulzer"), Mark Hamlet ("Hamlet"), and Robert White ("White") alleging discrimination on a variety of grounds.¹ The core claim involves disparate treatment and mixed-motive discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Pay Act, and analogous state legislation.

At their inception, these statutes comprised broad remedial legislation, and the earlier case law emphasized the importance of their progressive goals. E.g. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 429-30, 91 S.Ct. 849, 28 L.Ed.2d 158 (1971), (the primary prophylactic objective of Title VII is "to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of [certain] employees over other employees"); Sprogis v. United Air Lines, Inc., 444 F.2d 1194, 1198 (7th Cir.1971) ("In forbidding employers to discriminate against individuals because of their sex, Congress intended to strike at the entire spectrum of disparate treatment of men and women resulting from sex stereotypes").

But, as the number of federal discrimination claims have multiplied, judicial decisions appear to reflect more concern for "disgruntled employees" seeking wrongfully to exploit federal resources than for broad social and legal reform. See, e.g. Bray v. Marriott Hotels, 110 F.3d 986, 1002 (3rd Cir.1997) (Alito, J., dissenting) (anti-discrimination law was not designed to allow "disgruntled employees" to impose the costs of trial on employers who, although they have not acted with the intent to discriminate, may have treated their employees unfairly); Visser v. Packer Engineering Associates, 924 F.2d 655, 659 (7th Cir.1991) (discrimination law would be "unmanageable if disgruntled employees" could defeat summary judgment by affidavits simply speculating about a defendant's motives). As a result, an elaborate law of summary judgment has evolved purportedly to separate the meritorious from the frivolous claim. Yet some courts may well have gone too far, fashioning rigid rules to deal with what is a complex and often nuanced reality² and granting summary judgment to defendants in the vast majority of federal employment discrimination cases — even where substantial issues may predominate over contrived ones.

These concerns lead me to scrutinize this action: where the defendants move for summary judgment on the ground that the discrimination complaint is a cover for a "disgruntled employee" seeking to redress workplace grievances unrelated to gender,³ and the plaintiff counters that she has produced enough evidence to justify a trial on her discrimination claims. After reviewing all of the submissions in this case, I must conclude that the facts — as they have been developed by plaintiff's counsel⁴ — do not meet any of the relevant tests to defeat the defendants' motion for summary judgment.

The story that emerges from the documents is not one of discrimination, but one of performance, of administrative deficiencies and inadequate sales, of careless inventory management and delinquent expense reporting. Scott might well have sought to contextualize her inadequacies, claiming, for example, that male workers who had similarly problematic records were treated better or that she was subjected to higher levels of scrutiny. Instead, beyond her conclusory allegations and unsupported second-hand accounts, she offers no objective comparative data to support such a claim. She points only to a series of remarks made by one decisionmaker on one occasion about her hair and appearance — comments that may be a cue to a stereotyped view of women and their role in the workplace. However, the particular context in which those remarks were made suggest not even a tangential connection to the negative performance evaluations that predate them nor the adverse employment decisions that surround them. Rather, opinions of Scott's work performance are corroborated by an extensive record, developed both long before and long after these isolated comments were made.

Accordingly, for the reasons elaborated in greater detail below, the defendants' Motion for Summary Judgment [docket entry # 29] is GRANTED.

I. FACTS

A. Scott's Hiring

Sulzer, a manufacturer of prosthetic heart valves, hired Scott in January of 1994 as a District Sales Manager ("DSM") to sell its products to hospitals throughout the United States. Eight other individuals were hired as DSMs over the course of 1994.⁵ All DSMs reported directly to Mark Hamlet, who was responsible for overseeing the performance of Sulzer's entire sales force.

Scott was hired specifically as Sulzer's DSM for the New England Region, Territory 1110, which included New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and upstate New York. In addition to her sales duties, Scott's administrative responsibilities included territory budgeting and expense control, inventory management, accounts receivable collection, support in meeting regulatory requirements, participation in company and customer meetings, and maintaining timely, accurate, and complete activity reports.⁶

As part of her compensation, Scott was offered a package that included a $50,000 base salary, a guaranteed target commission of $40,000 (pro-rated from starting date), and a $450 monthly car allowance.

Around the commencement of her employment, Scott received and signed for the Sulzer Employee Handbook ("the Handbook"). In signing the Handbook Receipt and Acknowledgment form, Scott acknowledged that she understood the nature of her employment to be at will and, hence, terminable by Sulzer or Scott at any time.⁷ Sulzer's at will employment policy is reiterated many times in the text of the Handbook.⁸

The Handbook also contains a "progressive discipline policy," which provides that a supervisor may take one or more of the following steps in addressing an employee's performance or conduct: investigation, counseling, verbal warming, written warning, suspension, or discharge.⁹

B. Scott's Performance

1. 1994 — Spring 1996

Scott's performance was problematic from the outset. For the 1994 fiscal year, she sold sixty-two valves, or 30.3% of her targeted sales figures of 200 valves. Among DSMs, she ranked fourth of ten in both number of sales and percent of sales target. She achieved sales in only six of thirty-three hospitals in her target territory, and the bulk of her successful sales (forty-two/sixty-two) occurred at one, the Beth Israel Deaconess hospital in Boston, the site of Sulzer's clinical transplant trials.¹⁰

Significantly, during the course of Sulzer's 1994 inventory audit, Scott was unable to account for three valves.¹¹ Defendants estimate that mislaid valves were written off at a cost of more than $3,000 per valve and potentially jeopardized Sulzer's FDA-mandated compliance requirements.¹²

Scott's work performance for 1994 was first reviewed formally in February, 1995, by her then supervisor Russ McDaniell ("McDaniell"). In his Exempt Employee Performance Summary for Scott, McDaniell rated her performance as "Good/Needs Improvement," noting that Scott was deficient in three areas: her lack of maturity in handling corporate policy, her lack of poise in front of surgeons and company personnel, and her lack of care and promptness in expense reporting.¹³

In June of 1995, Patrick Kothe, Director of Sales Administration and of Marketing, sent Scott a memorandum concerning her excessive requests for the reimbursement of business expenses. Kothe speculated that Scott's targeted annual expenditures for promotional goods, including pen and pencil sets, golf and tennis balls, and Swiss Army knives, would exceed $20,000 — this in addition to other expenses routinely incurred by DSMs in soliciting and entertaining Sulzer clients.¹⁴ By Kothe's estimation, no other DSM ever submitted requests approaching this magnitude.¹⁵

Six days later, Lisa Standley ("Standley"), Director, General Accounting at Sulzer, sent Scott a memorandum in which she advised Scott that her privilege to have expenses reimbursed on the basis of faxed expense reports was being revoked due to Scott's consistent failure to comply with Sulzer protocol. Sulzer protocol required the prompt submission of expense reports in hard copy and with supporting documentation.¹⁶ According to Standley, Scott was the only DSM between 1994 and 1997 "who was so consistently late in submitting her original expense form and receipts that the privilege to [sic] paid based upon the faxed form was revoked."¹⁷

In November of 1995, Kothe advised Scott of her continued failure to comply with Sulzer's consignment audit requirements. Specifically, Kothe advised Scott that, three weeks after the audit was due, she had completed only four of eleven sites.¹⁸ Approximately one month later, Scott disclosed that she had lost one of her valves when Sulzer products had allegedly been stolen from the trunk of her car.¹⁹ Kothe, believing that no other DSM had ever lost valves from their inventory,²⁰ advised Scott that the value of any subsequently lost valves would be deducted from her sales commission.²¹ Donna Robinson, Manager of Sales Administration, followed up Kothe's memorandum with one of her own, reprimanding Scott for inaccurate...