Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, DISCRIMINATION—7th Cir.: White employee, suspended for policy violations, suspected FMLA abuse, cannot revive lawsuit, (Aug 13, 2025)

By Marjorie Johnson, J.D.

The employee did not dispute the rule violations or that her Black supervisor honestly believed under the circumstances, even if mistakenly, that she was abusing her FMLA leave.

A white assistant community living specialist (ACLS) for the City of Chicago failed to revive claims that her new Black supervisor suspended her three times because of her race and in violation of her FMLA rights—and not due to misconduct, performance issues, and the belief that she was engaging in FMLA fraud. Affirming summary judgment for the city, the Seventh Circuit concluded that no reasonable jury could find that the city suspended her because of her race rather than her admitted problems with her performance, and the honest belief rule defeated her claims for interference and retaliation under the FMLA (Paterakos v. City of Chicago , No. 24-1567 (7th Cir. Aug. 12, 2025)).

The plaintiff worked for Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services (DFSS) since 2012. She worked in a call center at city hall, and her essential duties included providing assistance to adults with disabilities, older adults, and their families regarding social services. In March 2020 she began reporting to a Black supervisor who was assigned to oversee the call center with the specific goal of improving the performance of all ACLSs.

Rule violations. Over the next seven months, her supervisor recommended that she be disciplined three times, resulting in one-, three-, and five-day suspensions under the city’s progressive discipline policy. The first two suspensions related to her violation of various personnel rules, including her failure to place her work phone on “not-ready” status when she was unavailable to take calls, her violation of lunch and break policies, and her use of the copy and fax machines for personal reasons. Although she substantially admitted to the conduct identified as the basis for each suspension, she believed the supervisor singled her out for harsh treatment.

Suspected FMLA fraud. The third suspension involved her use of FMLA leave, which the city had approved for her to care for her ailing father. On several mornings in July when she took FMLA leave, her supervisors observed her on her cell phone and talking to police officers on duty around city hall. As a result, they believed she was abusing her FMLA leave. She continued to take FMLA leave in 2020 after her suspension. In 2021, she applied and was approved for intermittent FMLA leave to care for her father.

Brief transfer. Meanwhile, in April 2020, the city opened temporarily a second call center to provide ACLSs more room for social distancing. The employee and nine peers were instructed to report to the new location on April 6. She objected, and her union grieved the assignment. After the first week, assignments were made according to seniority, and the employee was only required to report to the second location for one week.

Procedural background. The employee sued the city and her supervisor, claiming that all three suspensions were based on her race and age and that the third suspension also violated her FMLA rights. The district court dismissed all claims on summary judgment, finding that the brief reassignment was not an adverse employment action, and that no reasonable jury could find that defendants violated Title VII, the ADEA, the FMLA or the employee’s equal protection rights. She appealed as to the race and FMLA claims but dropped her ADEA claim.

Reassignment not adverse action. Following the district court’s ruling, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Muldrow v. City of St. Louis, in which the Court clarified that a Title VII plaintiff identifying a job transfer as an adverse employment action must still show “some harm respecting an identifiable term or condition of employment,” though they need not show that the harm incurred was “significant,” or “serious, or substantial.” The Seventh Circuit found that, even under the Muldrow standard, the employee’s one-week reassignment to a different location to enable social distancing in the earliest stages of the pandemic did not constitute an adverse employment action. Though her work hours were shifted by half an hour and she needed to report to a different location, she failed to identify “any way that either of these minor changes in her working conditions objectively harmed her,” concluded the court.

Prior criticisms. She also failed to demonstrate that the city’s performance-based rationales for the three suspensions were pretexts for racial discrimination. Though she argued that she had not been previously disciplined, her record was not “virtually pristine” before she began reporting to the new supervisor. In 2019, a prior supervisor counseled her after she walked away from her desk without notice, and she also received a poor performance evaluation mere months before the new supervisor’s arrival.

Admitted behaviors. She also did not dispute the most significant facts on which the city based her suspensions. Regarding the first suspension, she admitted that she sometimes forgot to leave her phone in not-ready mode when away from her desk, changed her scheduled lunch time without permission, went on breaks without notifying a supervisor, and used the fax machine for personal reasons. As for the second suspension, she admitted that she failed to attend the majority of a mandatory webinar. And for the third, she admitted to socializing with police officers in or around city hall when she was on FMLA leave and to have signed in late on two of the listed days.

Though she disputed the significance of her misconduct and the reasonableness of her supervisor’s expectations, the Seventh Circuit would not sit as a “super-personnel department” determining “whether an employer’s expectations were fair, prudent, or reasonable.” She admitted that she failed to comply with the city’s legitimate policies and failed to present any evidence undermining the city’s assertion that the suspensions were based on these performance deficiencies.

Stray remark. The district court also did not err in finding that the supervisor’s stray remark at the first pre-disciplinary hearing that the employee was “too privileged” for the supervisor to speak with her was completely unrelated to her race. She also failed to present evidence that the city failed to follow its progressive discipline policy or that she was treated worse than a similarly situated non-white ACLS.

No FMLA violations. Summary judgment was also proper as to her FMLA interference and retaliation claims since she failed to dispute that her supervisors honestly believed she was abusing her FMLA leave. Her supervisors personally observed the alleged conduct, which led them to believe that she was abusing her leave. And to the extent that some of her calls may have been made for FMLA-reasons and therefore her supervisors may have been mistaken, the city was entitled the honest-belief defense.

Though the procedure the city followed before suspending her for abusing her FMLA rights “left something to be desired,” noted the Seventh Circuit, her supervisor testified that she never received any training on what constitutes protected activity under the FMLA, and that the employee never informed her that her phone calls were related to her father’s care. Absent any concrete information, her supervisor assumed based on her own FMLA leave and general managerial experience that taking phone calls could not be related to caring for a family member. “That assumption was mistaken, but the fact that [the supervisor] was ignorant of [the employee’s] reason for taking FMLA leave and made unsupported assumptions about [the employee’s] conduct did not suggest that she did not really believed [the employee] was abusing her FMLA leave,” the Seventh Circuit concluded.

The case is No. 24-1567.

Judge: Hamilton, D.

Attorneys: Heidi Karr Sleper (Kurtz, Sleper & Exline) for Stella Paterakos. Suzanne M. Loose, City of Chicago Law Department, for City of Chicago and Crystal Warren.

Companies: City of Chicago

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