Employee’s Unreasonable Objection to DEI Training Is Not Protected by Title VII
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit rejected an employee’s claim that he was unlawfully terminated in retaliation for his refusal to complete mandatory unconscious bias training – good news for employers’ diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
In Vavra v. Honeywell Int’l, Inc., the President of a Company unit sent a September email entitled “Continue to Fight for Social Justice,” reacting to a grand jury’s decision not to indict officers involved in a Black woman’s death and stating “Racial bias is real…. Each of us has unconscious bias within us.” He also noted that the unit would be taking various actions “to make a difference.” Subsequently, the unit rolled out mandatory, online unconscious bias training. The employee never accessed the training, despite a multitude of automated and personal reminders. In response, the employee sent an email, claiming that the President’s email turned him and his White colleagues into villains, denying that he had unconscious bias, and calling the training “a joke.” The reminders to take the training continued. The employee’s supervisor told the employee that he had taken the training, including a video involving unconscious bias towards a white male, and the supervisor did not perceive it as racist. The employee continued to refuse to take the training, despite additional requests and warnings that termination would be the consequence, and he was finally terminated.
The Seventh Circuit threw out the employee’s lawsuit. While the federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title VII, protect employees from retaliation for opposing unlawful discrimination, the Seventh Circuit noted that the employee “must have an objectively reasonable belief that the action [he] opposed violated the law.” Moreover, “an employee must have some knowledge of the conduct he is opposing for his belief to be objectively reasonable.” In this case, because the employee never accessed the training or otherwise determined what it included, his “purely speculative” assumption that it violated Title VII, particularly in light of his supervisor’s “concrete” information to the contrary, “could not have been objectively reasonable.”
This case is good news for employers in the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) that employees cannot simply refuse DEI training without any reasonable basis for their objection. And the employer here provided an excellent blueprint for handling such a refusal: multiple reminders (both automated and live) to complete the training; extending the deadline for well over a month; and multiple meetings with the employee to ask about his specific concerns, to explain what the training actually included, and to warn of the consequences of continued refusal. But employers should keep in mind that the Seventh Circuit’s position may not necessarily be shared by all of its sister Circuits – particularly those like the Fifth and Eleventh that are more conservative.
