Opinion
No. 02 C 9178.
March 11, 2003
MEMORANDUM ORDER
In response to this Court's February 26, 2003 memorandum order ("Order"), counsel for Certified Grocers Midwest, Inc. ("Certified Grocers") have filed its Amended Answer and Affirmative Defenses ("ADs") to the employment discrimination action brought against Certified Grocers by its ex-employee Latroy Hubbard. That new pleading has satisfactorily addressed each of the matters referred to in the Order, in particular by sharpening up the A.D. 1 assertion that part of Hubbard's allegations are assertedly beyond the scope of the charge that he had filed with EEOC.
But having said that, this Court strikes A.D. 1 as a substantive matter. It has long been the rule in this Circuit that, as recently reconfirmed in Peters v. Renaissance Hotel Operating Co., 307 F.3d 535, 550 (7th Cir. 2002) (citations and internal quotation marks omitted):
Generally a plaintiff may not bring claims under Title VII that were not originally brought among the charges to the EEOC. This rule both afford[s] an opportunity for the EEOC to settle the dispute between the employee and employer and put[s] the employer on notice of the charge against it. Nevertheless, this court has allowed plaintiffs to proceed on claims not explicitly Bet forth in a charge of discrimination if the claim is like or reasonably related to the EEOC charges and the claim in the complaint reasonably [could] be expected to grow out of an EEOC investigation of the charge [ ]. For purposes of this standard, [t]he claims are not alike or reasonably related unless there is a factual relationship between them. This means that the EEOC charge and the complaint must, at minimum, describe the same conduct and implicate the same individuals.
To the same effect, the Court of Appeals has commented from time to time on the needless waste involved if an employee had to be sent back to EEOC to file an additional charge of discrimination in such circumstances.
In this instance Hubbards June 21, 2002 EEOC charge (Complaint Ex. B) followed his recitation of assertedly discriminatory treatment on the part of Certified Grocers with this statement:
On June 9, 2002 I was threatened with termination. According to Complaint ¶¶ 17-20, within less than two months thereafter, and while the investigation of that charge remained pending, Hubbard was indeed terminated. That squarely fits the quoted language from Peters (and the uniform holdings of other Seventh Circuit cases), and so AD I. is stricken as a matter of law.