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Javits Center Fired Cleaner Who Voiced Support for Axed Coworkers: Lawsuit

By Maya Rajamani | October 20, 2016 3:43pm
 The Javits Center.
The Javits Center.
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Javits Center

HELL'S KITCHEN — The Javits Center used a longtime housekeeper's decades-old criminal history as a "pretext" for firing her after she voiced support for co-workers who were dismissed for allegedly stealing items discarded during conventions, a lawsuit charges.

The massive convention space at 655 W. 34th St. fired 62-year-old Maria de Martinez — a housekeeping employee for more than a decade — after discovering she’d committed a non-violent crime back in 1989, the suit says.

But Javits officials actually sent Martinez packing because she “fit the bill and profile of [the] unwanted, older employees” the center let go as part of a “firing spree” that took place in the spring of 2015, her attorney Faruk Usar said. 

Martinez started working as a cleaner at the Javits Center in May 2004.

In March 2015, the center decided to search all of its housekeeping employees’ lockers after one staffer allegedly stole from the center, according to the suit.

During the search, Javits' security team found items including discarded promotional pens and key chains from past conventions inside 15 to 25 employees' lockers.

Those employees — most of whom were Hispanic, older than 40 and longtime Javits Center cleaners — were suspended without pay and most were fired the following month, according to the suit.

When the locker searches took place, Martinez “openly expressed [to co-workers] that the searches were unlawful and pre-textual," saying she felt the accused employees should hire lawyers and file complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the suit says.

Though it was technically prohibited, employees had long been taking “discarded trinkets” from the garbage after conventions because supervisors had condoned the practice for years, the suit claims.

Not long after Martinez made the comments, she was called into a meeting with Javits Center officials who asked her if she had a prior criminal history.

Martinez told them about an incident that took place in 1989 that resulted in a second-degree conspiracy charge but said she had no criminal history since then.

She agreed to sign two forms written in English so the Javits Center could run a “consumer report” on her, not realizing she was “waiving all of her rights and claims” against the Javits Center, according to the suit.

A native Spanish speaker, Martinez speaks English but doesn’t read it fluently.

On the same day she signed the forms, the Javits Center suspended her from work without pay and asked her to go home, the suit says.

A week later, she received a letter from the senior vice president of human resources for the Javits Center warning her she might be terminated because of a background report that “identified prior criminal convictions that were not disclosed," the suit says. 

She learned she was being fired at the beginning of May 2015. The suit was filed on July 5, 2016, in Manhattan federal court. 

When Martinez applied for her job at the center in 2004, she gave them biographical information, identification and her Social Security card, assuming the center had used those resources to run a full background check, the lawsuit says.

A friend filled out her application form for her and "checked off the lines" about past criminal history without asking her about it, her attorney said in an email.

She never hid or lied about her prior criminal history, which “[bore] absolutely no relation to her duties as a cleaner in housekeeping,” according to the suit.

The suit claims the Javits Center used Martinez’s criminal history as a pretense for firing her, when the real reason may have been her age, her ethnicity, her disability, the “comments she made against management” or a combination of those factors.

Since 2011, Martinez has dealt with chronic pain that forced her to request accommodations from her supervisors and take leaves from work on occasion, the suit says.

Around 2013, one of the managers at the Javits Center started allotting Martinez fewer hours than her coworkers, according to the suit.

After she complained to her managers about this, the center started placing her in busy areas that required more laborious tasks during conventions, the suit says.

“Ms. Martinez was beloved at her job, by her co-workers and convention-goers… loved her job at the Javits Center and was extremely shocked and humiliated to be thrown out like yesterday’s trash,” Usar wrote in an email.

In a filing responding to Martinez’s suit, the Javits Center said Martinez was fired "for falsifying her employment application,” but denied that she was wrongfully terminated.

The suit is seeking unspecified damages to be determined at trial. 

A spokesman for the Javits Center declined to comment.