The trial for the remaining three — Stephanie L. Ochoa, Tina M. Reynolds, and Elizabeth A. Rogers — started Jan. 25.
A federal jury Monday awarded the three women a total sum of $351,936 in back pay — $116,653 to Rogers, $123,447 to Reynolds and $111,836 to Ochoa, according to court records.
The jury also awarded each woman $85,000 as punitive damages for the Denver-based restaurant chain “acting with malice of reckless indifference” to the federal rights of each woman, court records show.
The sexual discrimination lawsuit claimed the women were fired from their positions at the chain’s downtown Cincinnati, Western Hills and Crescent Hills, Ky., locations with no due cause. It also claimed male employees were treated better and retained more often than female employees, regardless of those female employees’ superior performance evaluations and resulting pay raises and bonuses earned.
“Essentially what happened is you had a manager who obviously had some internal biases and there were no checks and balance in place,” Kelly Myers, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told the Journal-News on Tuesday. “There was nobody watching to ensure that consistent work expectations were in place and they had pulled the kind of on-the-ground or the field HR people out, made them recruiters and pushed that HR function down to the managers that were making the decisions.”
Chipotle did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
The two former Chipotle employees set for trial his April are Cristie R. Reynolds, who worked the chain’s Oxford location, and Kerri E. Breeze, who worked its Kenwood location.
Reynolds, who is no relation to Tina M. Reynolds, was hired by Chipotle in February 2004, promoted every year for her first three years as an employee and awarded a bonus every year, according to the lawsuit.
Named general manager of the Oxford location in 2011, she was told by a regional manager on Jan. 4, 2012, that she was doing a great job, but fired by that same manager just five days later, according to the lawsuit.
Breeze, who was hired in December 2009 as a manager in training, was fired under similar circumstances from her position as general manager of Chipotle’s Kenwood location in May 2011 and was replaced by a male employee, according to the lawsuit.
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