Nurse alleges Filipino coworkers bullied her over race, sues LA hospital
Camyle Meier claims in her lawsuit she was ostracized, intimidated and undermined by Filipino supervisors and coworkers. FILE PHOTO
LOS ANGELES – A former Cedars-Sinai Medical Center nurse is suing the hospital, alleging harassment and bullying by Filipino supervisors and co-workers and that a false excuse was used to justify firing her for complaining about the mistreatment.
Camyle Meier’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges gender discrimination, retaliation, breach of contract and the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, failure to prevent harassment, discrimination and retaliation, failure to take corrective action and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Meier, who is half-white and half-Japanese, seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages in the suit brought Wednesday. A Cedars representative said the hospital does not comment on pending litigation.
Camyle Meier ‘stood out like a sore thumb’
Meier was assigned to a section made up almost entirely of Filipino women who had worked together for approximately 12 years and the plaintiff “stood out like a sore thumb,” the lawsuit states.
Meier’s Filipino co-workers poured coffee into her backpack her first day and in later days her personal belongings were tampered with, according to court documents.
“The message of racial animus was clear,” the lawsuit states. “This was the beginning of plaintiff’s constant harassment, ostracization, abuse, intimidation, marginalization, bullying and undermining by the Filipina staff in her section at work.”
Meier alleges her Filipino colleagues subjected her to falsified complaints and unreasonable scrutiny and assigned her to work with the heaviest and most difficult patients, setting her up to fail by not giving her the proper training.
When Meier resisted actions she believed to be unlawful, she allegedly was retaliated against with more harassment.
She was put on leave two days before her six-month probationary period was up and she was terminated based upon an allegedly falsified time recording policy violation, which she says was different from the policy given to her previously, the suit states.
Meier maintains the allegedly discriminatory conduct she suffered violated Cedars’ own policy that forbids disparate treatment of employees on such bases as race, gender and age, while also banning retaliation against workers who file good-faith complaints.
Meier contends she has suffered both lost income as well as emotional distress because of losing her job.
“Plaintiff did nothing to create the extremely stressful situation that the defendants … caused her,” according to the suit, which does not state the year she was fired.
