[ad_1]
Bungie is being sued by its former human relations manager for wrongful termination and retaliation, alleging she was dismissed after trying to make supervisors aware of a potential case of racial bias.
Reported first by IGN, Ingrid Alm first joined Bungie in May 2022, only months after a previous report from IGN where 25 employees accused Bungie of allowing a toxic company culture to grow which included racial and gender bias.
According to the lawsuit, after Alm joined the team she was asked to look into an employee referred to as “James Smith,” whom she learned was the only Black employee on a team of 50, which to Smith felt like being racially singled out by their supervisor.
When Alm told her own supervisor this, and recommended Smith’s supervisor and other individuals attend diversity training, Alm was met with “hostility and denial.” Alm claims her supervisor told her that Smith’s supervisor and others were “highly regarded” in the studio, and had been with the company “a long time.”
Her supervisor even went as far as saying “she didn’t want to touch those conversations with a ten-foot pole,” according to Alm.
Alm goes on to claim that Bungie then suggested firing Smith, to which Alm disagreed on the grounds it would be racial bias, and went to Bungie’s director for equity and inclusion, Dr. Courtney Benjamin for further guidance.
Benjamin agreed with Alm that terminating Smith was not the path to take, calling it “too risky considering the evidence” and instead suggested Smith receive a written warning. Alm’s supervisor then allegedly became “extremely angry” at Alm for reaching out to Benjamin, gave Alm a written waring, and even apologized to Benjamin for Alm having reached out to her.
Alm’s supervisor also allegedly told Benjamin that “she didn’t want her to think she was a racist.” Then in September 2022, Alm was placed in the “needs improvement” category during her employee review, an outlier among other glowing reviews from peers and clients.
It was at this point that Alm’s supervisor told her to find an “off-ramp,” an exit path from her current job at Bungie. Alm then awoke one morning to find her email and company platform access cut off, receiving no response from her supervisor for several days.
At the end of September 2022 Alm was told that her resignation from Bungie had been accepted, despite having not sent in any resignation. She was then asked and declined to sign a document which stated that she “voluntarily resigned,” and has yet to receive a response from Bungie’s chief people officer Holly Barbacovi explaining the situation.
For Bungie’s part, the studio does not try to discredit Alm’s version of events or put out its own, instead its representative counsel Mary DePaolo Haddad states that Bungie “lacks knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to the truth or falsity of the allegations.”
Source – [IGN]
[ad_2]
Source link
