MEMPHIS Tenn. – – Grabbing, groping and inappropriate comments; they’re all part of sexual harassment claims a group of women have made against their former employer, XPO Logistics.
They worked at an XPO warehouse in southeast Memphis. They’ve all filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Angel Caldwell is one of them. She worked at the warehouse for seven months.
“One of the supervisors, he was just a pervert,” she says.
She says he made inappropriate comments about her body and, on one occasion, she says he kept rubbing her neck and shoulders even though she told him to stop.
“I’m like can you stop touching me? He didn’t catch on until I walked off,” Caldwell says.
She says she told a manager who did nothing and cracked jokes about it.
We called and emailed XPO’s corporate office asking the company to respond to these allegations and other allegations concerning dangerous work conditions but, as of the time of this writing, we have not heard back.
Two current workers say employees work 12 hour days on production lines. They say employees are constantly overheated and exhausted because the facility doesn’t have air conditioning.
“They’re risking our lives in that building,” Lakeisha Nelson says.
She and her colleague say a woman passed out and died in October when management wouldn’t let co-workers give her CPR. Elizabeth Howley says they were forced to work around the body.
“It was horrifying,” she says.
Since then, the Teamsters Union has been rallying against XPO facilities across the country and around the world. Because of that, workers say some things have changed but not much.
“They’re only trying to make some efforts now because they have been exposed,” Nelson says.
According to the EEOC, XPO recently settled a religious discrimination lawsuit in federal court for $94,541. The suit alleges the company wouldn’t hire a man who needed to start work one day late so he could observe a Jewish holiday.
