FedEx employee fired for attending Alcoholics Anonymous meeting claims ‘anti-white’ discrimination

A recovering alcoholic working at a FedEx facility in rural Pennsylvania claims she got fired for leaving early to attend an AA meeting, and contends her termination came about, to a significant degree, because her boss was prejudiced against white people.

In a federal lawsuit filed Monday and obtained by The Independent, Margaret Fiander, 64, alleges violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, and Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which proscribes race-based discrimination.

On top of allegedly failing to accommodate her disability, Fiander’s former supervisor at FedEx “discriminated against [her] because she is Caucasian and not Hispanic,” according to her complaint, which says Latino employees were given “preferential treatment,” while whites were “treated… less favorably.”

Reached by phone on Tuesday, Fiander told The Independent, “This would’ve been settled and resolved by now, it shouldn’t have gone this far. I still wanted to work, I didn’t want it to get to this.”

Fiander said management “singled me out and targeted me for things that everybody else got away with.” This, she lamented, kept her from advancing professionally, and today she remains out of work.

“I had trouble getting jobs after that,” Fiander said, emphasizing that she believes her whiteness was in fact a detriment at FedEx.

A FedEx spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Fiander hired on at FedEx in December 2020, assigned to FedEx’s 970,000 square-foot regional sorting center in Breinigsville, a town of 8,000 near Allentown, where she worked as a package handler, according to her complaint.

“You’ll work in a fast-paced warehouse-like environment taking responsibility for tracking shipments and working safely and efficiently while sorting, processing, loading, and unloading packages,” the official job description reads. “You may be called upon to use equipment such as hydraulic conveyor belts in your work.”

Although she at one point had substance abuse issues, Fiander, who had an attorney file her initial complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but is now representing herself in court, says she has been clean for more than two decades.

“Plaintiff is an alcoholic and has attended weekly Alcoholics Anonymous (‘AA’) meetings on Mondays for 21 years and has maintained sobriety for 21 years,” her complaint states.

In March 2021, Fiander asked her then-manager if she could leave early on Mondays so she could make her regular meeting, the complaint continues. It says he told Fiander that doing so “would not be an issue.”

“Thereafter, [Fiander] left at approximately 4:00 pm every Monday to attend AA meetings,” the complaint says.

Fiander would always inform whatever supervisor was on duty of the arrangement, and for the next two years, “no manager objected,” the complaint states.

“I never had documentation in writing that I could leave at 4 o'clock, but I should have,” Fiander told The Independent. “I said, ‘Should I just get this in writing?’ And they said, ‘No, just let them know.’ It got to the point where everybody knew. I mean, common sense – you don’t walk off the job without permission.”

On August 7, 2023, Fiander reminded the shift manager that she would be leaving at 4 p.m. for her meeting, to which the manager replied, “OK,” the complaint goes on.

The next day, according to the complaint, Fiander received an alert on the FedEx scheduling app, informing her that all of her shifts for the rest of the week, as well as the following week, had been canceled.

Confused, Fiander reached out to the HR department but wasn’t able to get anyone on the phone at the time, the complaint states. However, she soon discovered that the app allowed her to reclaim at least some of the lost shifts, which the complaint says Fiander promptly did.

But, on August 9, the shift manager who two days prior had given Fiander a green light to leave early called and fired her, according to the complaint.

He told Fiander that she had “violated company policy” by leaving work early on August 7, “despite this being her long-standing accommodation that had been approved and in place for over two years,” the complaint states, calling the manager’s claim “a pretext.”

In actuality, the complaint alleges, Fiander was fired “because of her disability and/or in retaliation for requesting and utilizing a reasonable accommodation,” and asserts that her supervisors were bigoted against whites. Fiander’s higher-ups “considered [her] race in denying [her] reasonable accommodation and in terminating [her] employment,” according to the complaint.

“They wanted to get rid of me, I have no idea why,” Fiander told The Independent. “There was somebody there that had it in for me.”

So-called reverse discrimination lawsuits have become more and more common in the age of Donald Trump, and the Supreme Court may soon make it easier for members of majority groups to bring bias cases. Last month, a judge in Michigan paved the way for a terminated IBM employee to sue the company over alleged discrimination because he is a white male. In 2024, Sony settled a pending lawsuit claiming discrimination against white job applicants.

On the flip side, more diverse companies tend to be more profitable than ones that are less so, according to McKinsey & Company. Further, reverse discrimination suits can also flop. A federal judge recently ruled against a white man who sued 3M after he was fired for using his cellphone on the production floor, arguing that management let slide a pair of similarly situated Black female employees for the same infraction. Similarly, a federal judge last year threw out a suit by an NYU law student who claimed the school’s law review was biased against white males.

Fiander is seeking a court order prohibiting FedEx from “discriminating against employees or prospective employees based on their disability and/or need for an accommodation,” and wants back pay and future lost earnings.

She is also asking for liquidated and punitive damages significant enough “to punish [FedEx] for their willful, deliberate, malicious, and outrageous conduct and to deter… [them] from engaging in such misconduct in the future,” plus damages for emotional distress and pain and suffering to be decided by a jury, in addition to court costs and attorneys’ fees.