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The attorney representing four plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit alleging discrimination against White employees by American Express fired off a letter to the company's lawyers last week accusing the credit card behemoth of violating its own values.
"Since we exposed AmEx's discriminatory, anti-white policies over a year ago, they have repeatedly called our allegations meritless and false," attorney David Pivtorak told FOX Business. "Now that a host of employees from across the country have come forward to share similar experiences, AmEx wants to drag their stories into the shadows."
"American Express boasts publicly about its colleague trust and transparency," Pivtorak tweeted last week. "But when workers unite against company-wide discrimination, AmEx tries to split them up and force them into secret proceedings stacked against them. So I wrote their lawyers, calling out the hypocrisy."
In a copy of the letter he attached to his tweet, Pivtorak wrote that he was responding to a request from Amex's attorneys to dismiss the lawsuit "and force the individual plaintiffs—and the thousands of workers they represent—into coerced, secretive, single-party arbitration."
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Pivtorak went on to accuse Amex of "making a mockery" of its own "Blue Box Values" that commit to colleague "transparency" and "fighting against all forms of discrimination," saying "its recent actions seem to claim otherwise."
FILE: The logo of American Express (AXP) is seen in Los Angeles, California, United States, on April 25, 2016. (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo / Reuters Photos)
On Aug. 23, former American Express employee Brian Netzel filed a class-action complaint alleging that the company exhibited "callous indifference" to civil rights law by terminating him because he is White and spoke out against its "racially discriminatory" policies.
The lawsuit alleges that Amex implemented "anti-racism" policies throughout its corporate structure in the wake of George Floyd's death that "gave preferential treatment to individuals for being Black and unambiguously signaled to White employees that their race was an impediment to getting ahead in the company."
Netzel told FOX Business at the time that Amex's racial policies flooded the workplace with "a tremendous amount of animosity." He alleged White employees were unfairly punished or passed over for promotions, while some Black employees were promoted merely to meet racial quotas, and that some felt empowered to "root out in McCarthy-era fashion people who didn't agree with this overall philosophy."
In September, three more plaintiffs joined the complaint alleging similar treatment.
Amex has denied the lawsuit's allegations, with a spokesperson telling FOX Business: "The allegations made about our company by the four claimants and their lawyer are completely without merit."
Pivtorak told FOX Business that the company "is demanding secret proceedings in front of hand-picked judges who work for an organization that AmEx has paid to handle hundreds of its cases."
"These are precisely the types of forced, secret proceedings that allowed Harvey Weinstein and large corporate employers to engage in persistent predatory behavior until Congress was finally pressured to enact the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault & Sexual Harassment Act," the attorney continued.
"In this case, forced arbitration is not only fundamentally unfair but ironic, given that AmEx is repeatedly staking its public reputation on how much it values ‘transparency’ and listening to the voices of its employees," Pivtorak added.
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A spokesperson for Amex also pushed back against wording in Pivtorak's letter that suggested there are "thousands" of similarly situated employees, emphasizing to FOX Business that only four plaintiffs have been named in the lawsuit.
Pivtorak remained adamant about his phrasing, telling FOX Business that he believes there are indeed potentially thousands of White employees who were subjected to discriminatory policies by the company.
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"The whole purpose of a class action is to have a few people represent the interests of many because a litigation with hundreds or thousands of named members is practically unworkable," he said. "I think the overwhelming online response to the case, and the stories it has generated from people who identify themselves as present or former workers, speak to the enormous number of people who agree with our claims."