Guerrero v Able Engineering
Feb 08, 2019OUTCOME: Ms. Guerrero was awarded $1,441,894.37.
Pamela Vallero won an employment case after a nine-day jury trial before the Honorable Kenneth J. Medel. Maria Guerrero, 63, worked as a janitor at the First Allied Plaza building in downtown San Dieg ... o. She was employed by a large national building services company that accrues over $1 billion in revenue every year. Over the course of her 11-year employment at the building, Ms. Guerrero suffered a shoulder injury. From 2010 until 2015, Ms. Guerrero scheduled her doctors’ appointments later in the day to avoid missing any work. In 2015, the building had a change in property management. The new management company regime started requiring formal written paperwork for everything, from partial day off requests to employee discipline. Once Ms. Guerrero began submitting formal requests for sick days to go to her doctors’ appointments, Defendants became aware of the financial burden she represented to them and began retaliating against her. The retaliation came in the form of unsupported write-ups, unwarranted suspensions without pay pending bogus investigations, and her ultimate termination. Defendants maintained that her termination was in fact a “layoff” because of an alleged change in building services companies. The alleged two “different” janitorial building services, however, was really two divisions of the same company. For example, Ms. Guerrero had, in the past, been transferred to the other department without interference to her duties. On the day of her termination, Ms. Guerrero was prohibited from entering the building in which she had worked for over a decade. Defendants further humiliated her after they both failed to communicate the termination until Ms. Guerrero’s daughter inquired about the status of the bogus investigation. In June 2017, Ms. Guerrero filed a lawsuit against her employer and the property management company.
