Real Change News | Lorig pays $22,000 to stop picketers

September 1, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 35

Short Takes

Lorig pays $22,000 to stop picketers

by: Cydney Gillis , Staff Reporter

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A small band of do-it-yourself protesters called the Seattle Solidarity Network has won a $22,000 settlement from developer Bruce Lorig, proving that sustained picketing gets action, the activists say.

All it proves, says Tom Fitzsimmons, chief operating officer of Lorig Associates, is that harassment pays. The company did nothing wrong, he says, but decided to settle the lawsuit that it filed last year to stop the pickets by Seattle Solidarity and former Lorig employee Patricia Milton because they weren’t good for business.

As part of the settlement, Lorig agreed to pay Milton $22,000 in lost wages related to her claims of discrimination. Milton, an African-American, worked 11 years for Lorig, but left in 2007 after a promotion was taken away and she was returned to a front-desk job – part of a pattern of racism that Milton has said she experienced at the company. At the time, she received a severance check and signed an agreement that she would not make disparaging remarks about Lorig in public. But, once the money and her unemployment ran out, Milton became homeless.

Last year, she began picketing the company with Seattle Solidarity, or SeaSol, a small group of labor activists who take up the cause of individuals wronged by employers and landlords. Lorig sued both Milton and three individual members of SeaSol to stop the pickets (“Developer sues activists over pickets for ex-employee,” Dec. 2-8, 2009), but a judge declined to issue an injunction against SeaSol on First Amendment grounds.

The pickets, which were held at buildings that Lorig manages and at various city council meetings where the company was up for contracts, were a hassle for Lorig’s tenants and clients, Fitzsimmons says. SeaSol’s members, he says, “basically harassed us sufficiently to a point where we decided ... it was better for us to say we will pay you to go away.”

Lee Campbell, a member of SeaSol, calls it a win, particularly in light of the major union-busting law firm – Jackson Lewis – that Lorig hired for the lawsuit. “Corporate wrong-doers almost never admit responsibility for anything,” Campbell says. The settlement “doesn’t mean all the wrongs have been righted,” he says, “but it does feel like a victory.”

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