Precision Planting Management committed shocking racial harassment of Black employee for years, says EEOC Charge

An EEOC Charge filed by an African American employee (the following is taken from the EEOC Charge) alleges that Precision Planting (“Precision”), a subsidiary of AGCO, has allowed racial harassment to continue despite repeated notice. For example, at a meeting managers joked about hanging and burning Black people and raping their women. Human Resources admitted it was aware of this incident and many others. HR told him he was an “emotional genius” for handling the abuse without having a crackup, but still failed to stop it.

When the Employee first began working at Precision towards the end of 2020, he immediately demonstrated his ability and willingness to work hard and achieve excellent results. Instead of congratulating the employee on his exemplary work, the employee’s coworkers and supervisors, resentful of having an African American employee do such good work, began making offensive racial jokes and comments daily. These comments included referring to him as “slave”, making so-called “slave jokes” because of how hard he worked, asking “why do black people work so hard?”, commenting “you must be from the south,” and when he explained he was from Arkansas, responding “that makes sense, you have a slave mentality, can you find other people like you?” meaning someone who “worked like a slave”.

Despite the Employee’s repeated complaints to management, Precision continued to allow and foster the racist environment through the years. The “slave” remarks and comments mocking his work ethic continued regularly. One coworker made numerous offensive comments such as “what’s 50 white guys chasing one black guy called? It’s called a PGA tour,” “Why do black people look like monkeys?”, “why do black people like watermelon and chicken?” and after a shooting in Morton, “I know it was one of you black people from Peoria.” His supervisor told him, “they’re just jealous, that’s why they make those comments.” He did not respond when the Employee asked why he did not do something to stop them. The remarks continued, unabated, on a daily basis. Nevertheless, the employee continued to excel in his job.

One particularly horrible incident occurred in late June 2024, at a meeting where all of the top managers at the plant, as well as an HR representative, were present. Someone from the Safety Department, who happened to have lost both of his hands, was going to be joining their next “all hands” meeting. One of the managers said, “I don’t like calling it an ‘all hands’ meeting because dude don’t have no hands.” People started laughing. Another manager stated, “I don’t like town hall meetings either because of what they used to do to black people at the meetings.” The first manager replied “Yeah, they used to hang and burn black people and raped the women in front of everybody.” Most of the people in the room started laughing and looking over at the Employee. One of the managers added that they used to use black babies to clean chimneys, and actually mimed babies being violently shoved down a chimney. They continued to look at the employee throughout their “joking”, while laughing. Even though the presence of HR and management in this meeting should have triggered a response on its own, the Employee also reported the incident to his direct supervisor. The supervisor promised to escalate the complaint to HR, however the Employee never heard from the company regarding this incident.

While reporting one of the many offensive racial comments he heard to HR, the Employee was told he was “an emotional genius” for being able to tolerate this treatment without blowing up at anyone. The Employee told the HR representative that he was not an emotional genius, he was simply trying to remain employed and that it was the company’s responsibility to protect him from such abuse. He asked members of the HR team and management on several occasions why nothing had been done to stop the racial harassment against him. None of them were able to answer the question.