Man sues Jordan's Furniture

Stephen Perry, a Taunton resident and a former routing coordinator and customer service representative for Jordan's Furniture who worked at the company for more than three years, filed a complaint in October against his former employer with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD) alleging that he was fired last month due to anti-gay bias on the part of his department supervisor. Perry also filed a civil suit against the company alleging wrongful termination, infliction of emotional distress and breach of contract. The civil suit also claims the motivation for his firing was discrimination based on sexual orientation. The charges in the MCAD complaint and the civil suit fly in the face of the strong pro-gay reputation of both the company and its founders, Barry and Eliot Tatelman; the company has a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, and the Tatelman brothers have engaged in substantial philanthropic efforts on behalf of HIV/AIDS and pro-gay causes.

Perry said he was out as a gay man to his coworkers early on in his tenure in the customer service department, which he joined in 2004, and all of his coworkers were supportive. From 2004 through 2006 he received generally positive employee reviews that described him as "an asset to the team" and that praised his efficiency, his initiative, his ability to "wow" customers, and his work as a team player. The only major black mark in his review record from his time in customer service is a complaint in 2006 that he was frequently tardy, a change from earlier reviews that praised his punctuality. Perry told Bay Windows those instances of tardiness did not rise to the level of formal disciplinary action, and after the 2006 review he made a stronger effort to be more punctual. He provided his personnel file, including copies of these reviews as well as his disciplinary forms, to Bay Windows. Jordan's Furniture did not respond to a request to verify that the documents Perry provided to Bay Windows represented his complete file.

Last February he received a promotion to the delivery department, where he coordinated the team of service technicians, keeping track of their schedules and changing their deployment to respond to emergencies. In that role he had a new boss, in-home service manager Scott Cunningham, as well as a new direct supervisor, Dawn Bradbury, both of whom are named as defendants in both the MCAD complaint and the civil suit. At least initially he maintained his track record of strong performance in his new position. His 90-day review from Cunningham, filed last May, says that Perry "has adapted well to the routing coordinator position" and that he "has an approachable personality, and this has assisted him in providing service for other areas of the department." In a section of the review highlighting Perry's success in learning the basic principles of the new job Cunningham writes, "Great job, Stephen!"

But Perry said there was tension between himself and Cunningham. He said Cunningham seemed visibly uncomfortable with any discussions that referenced Perry's sexual orientation. He said when he and coworkers would discuss the details of the preparations for his June wedding to his partner, Jason Lynch, Cunningham would roll his eyes and try to cut the conversation short.

"If he was present any time anyone had a question about the wedding, the honeymoon, anything, it was very visible that he was uncomfortable. ... The minute that an instance came up about the wedding or anything about my sexuality, it was, 'Nope, we're no longer talking about this, get back to work,'" said Perry.

He also claims that Cunningham reprimanded him for calling Lynch too frequently from the office and he said Cunningham never placed similar restrictions on the amount of calls his straight coworkers were allowed to make to their spouses or significant others.

Perry said he asked several of his former co-workers to speak with Bay Windows to corroborate his account his of the events that led to his termination, but he said none wanted to talk to the press, even anonymously, for fear of jeopardizing their jobs. In e-mails between Perry, Lynch, and Perry's former co-workers (provided to Bay Windows by Perry) several co-workers note that the company did not send out an e-mail notifying staff of his departure, but the staff members did not write about whether they thought Perry's sexual orientation had anything to do with his firing. Several of the co-workers expressed support for Perry, with one writing, "I agree 100% he was the best!" and another writing, "Made us all think they were completely crazy for not even showing him that much respect [by not sending out an e-mail]. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't know now, but none of it was given that 'management spin' so I think it worked out better for him in the end because people were talking about how an employee like him not getting so much as an email acknowledgement just means we are all in deep shit." The names and parts of the e-mail addresses on the copy of the e-mail exchanges were blacked out by Perry.

Perry and Lynch were married last June and three days after he returned from his honeymoon he received a "final warning," the most serious disciplinary notice in Jordan's Furniture's progressive discipline system short of termination. The notice, which Perry provided to Bay Windows, alleges that Perry falsified customer records by writing that he had contacted nine different customers on June 7 to set up deliveries. According to the outgoing phone records for Perry's extension, Perry placed no calls to those customers.

Perry, who denies he falsified records, said he asked for documentation showing the outgoing calls on his phone, but he said for six weeks Cunningham did not provide that documentation. When he asked Cunningham why he was given a final warning after previously maintaining a spotless disciplinary record with the company, he said it was due to the severity of the incident.

While waiting for the phone logs Perry was disciplined a second time, receiving a "verbal coaching," the lowest level of corrective action on Jordan's disciplinary scale, on July 27 for a series of related issues. The discipline report says that on one occasion he told Bradbury that he had sent a driver to a hardware store to pick up missing hardware to set up a bed for a customer, but later on that day he said he had not done so and told Bradbury she had misunderstood him. It says that incident led Bradbury to discover that Perry had not logged multiple instances of missing hardware in the missing hardware log. The report also says that on July 25 Perry refused to take a call from a coworker to assist a customer he had worked with earlier.

Perry said he was unfairly disciplined for each of these instances. He said the incident with the driver was a genuine misunderstanding between himself and Bradbury and during the July 25 incident he was on the line with another customer when he was asked to take a call. He said other employees failed to file appropriate missing hardware logs, but they were not disciplined. Perry said he believed that Cunningham and Bradbury were targeting him.

"It came across as, [Bradbury] was told to find anything on him to get rid of him," said Perry.

He said after waiting six weeks for the phone logs he requested a meeting with Jordan's Furniture Vice President Marty Sarkissian, and he told Sarkissian that he felt the final warning and verbal coaching were motivated by anti-gay discrimination. He said Sarkissian directed him to the director of the service department, Roy Muise, who met with both Perry and Cunningham. During that meeting Cunningham provided Perry with the phone records and Perry challenged their veracity, pointing to a three-hour window in the afternoon where the log records no outgoing calls. He said Muise seemed satisfied with the records and took no further action.

"I made the point to Roy that I feel discriminated against enough that I may need to seek legal counsel, and the attitude was like, okay," said Perry.

On Oct. 3 Cunningham fired Perry. According to the termination notice there were two instances in late September when he failed to provide assistance to customer service employees. An attached report by Bradley cites one customer service representative who told her "the overall feeling from the reps is that Stephen is reluctant to help when they call him."

Perry claims neither Bradley nor Cunningham told him prior to his firing that customer service representatives had complained about him.

"The first time that I had ever heard that anyone had ever complained that I was unhelpful was the termination process. ... My response to that was, if this has been a recurring thing, why is this just being brought up to me now?" said Perry.

Perry filed an MCAD complaint against Jordan's Furniture, as well as against Cunningham and Bradbury, on Oct. 18 and he filed a civil complaint against those same parties on Nov. 7 for wrongful termination, infliction of emotional distress, and breach of contract in Plymouth Superior Court. He said Cunningham's seeming discomfort with his sexual orientation, combined with the drastic change in Perry's disciplinary record working under Cunningham versus his record in the customer service department, suggest that Cunningham targeted him because he was gay.

Cunningham declined to comment for this story, referring Bay Windows to Jordan's Furniture's human resources department. Eliot Tatelman, who currently heads Jordan's Furniture (Barry Tatelman left the company in 2006) declined to comment on Perry's allegations, saying that it is premature to discuss them until the case goes to court.

"Right now he's claiming something, and I'm not going to comment on it because there's nothing to comment on," said Tatelman.

He said Jordan's Furniture has a policy banning discrimination in employment based on sexual orientation. On a personal level he said he has a strong commitment to fairness for gay and lesbian people, inspired in large part by his brother, the late Milton Tatelman, an advertising creator and entertainment critic who was openly gay and who died due to complications from AIDS in 1993. Milton Tatelman, according to his obituary in The New York Times, created many of the ads featuring his brothers that helped make Jordan's Furniture famous.

Tatelman said he has a long personal history of working on behalf of gay and HIV/AIDS causes. He founded a summer camp for children living with AIDS and for several years he has spoken at National Adoption Day events in Massachusetts advocating for the placement of children with gay and lesbian parents and couples. He has been a longtime supporter of the Boston Living Center, and on Nov. 20 he was one of the celebrity servers at the Living Center's Celebration of Life Thanksgiving Dinner.

Jordan's Furniture has not yet filed a response either to the MCAD complaint or the civil suit.