By Miles Maguire
A Calumet County woman has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Pacur LLC, the Oshkosh plastics company that has ties to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson.
The woman, Angela Valley, said she was hired at Pacur in September 2019. Her lawsuit alleges she was subjected to illegal discrimination and harassment, including vulgar text messages from coworkers making unwelcome sexual advances.
Although she complained to Pacur’s human resources department, Valley says the company did not take remedial action.
Instead company officials “met with Valley’s witnesses and required them to sign nondisclosure agreements prohibiting them from speaking about the events they observed,” according to court papers.
“While Pacur as a general matter does not comment on personnel matters, Pacur can affirm that it takes all matters of discrimination very seriously,” Barry Johnson, the company’s CEO, said in an email. “By law and by policy, Pacur has historically fully investigated all such complaints and did so involving the past employee referenced in your message to us.”
Barry Johnson is the brother of the Republican senator, who sold his ownership interest in the company in March 2020, according to his financial disclosure report.
Sen. Johnson and his wife continue to draw substantial income from Pacur, earning somewhere between $100,000 and $1 million a year, according to financial disclosures. They own a limited liability company that is the landlord for Pacur’s Moser Street factory, which city records value at $5.9 million.
The senator’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
According to Valley’s lawsuit, she trained to become a machine operator and was assigned to a crew where she was told her boss “made female employees on his crew perform the least desirable tasks to make them quit.”
For example she was forced to scrub the doors and walls of the company’s shipping and receiving dock, according to court papers.
“Valley’s male coworkers intentionally made messes (such as dumping garbage on the floor) and required Valley to clean it up, spit chewing tobacco on the floor directly in front of Valley immediately after Valley had just cleaned the floor, called Valley derogatory names such as ‘stupid bitch,’ told Valley that no one liked her and that she would never receive the same pay as they did,” the court file says.
Neither Valley’s supervisor nor Pacur’s human resources department took action to address her complaints, the lawsuit says.
But after Valley complained, she was demoted to the cleaning staff and required to work split shifts seven days a week. “The split shifts required Valley to leave work for approximately 4 1⁄2 hours between shifts,” the lawsuit states.
Eventually she was placed on administrative leave and then fired, the suit says.
Valley alleges that the demotion, leave and firing came “because she opposed discrimination and harassment in the workplace.”
In March she was given the go-ahead by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to file her lawsuit.
She is seeking “lost pay, lost benefits, out of pocket expenses, compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney’s fees and costs,” according to the court file.
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