OAKLAND, CA – A 70-year-old Home Depot employee, Carleen Acevedo, was fired by Home Depot “after a customer bullied her into completing a suspicious transaction,” according to a new lawsuit filed in the Contra Costa County Court here by the law firm of Chambord Benton-Hayes.
But a civil complaint filed on behalf of Acevedo said the real reason Home Depot fired Acevedo was “age discrimination, retaliation, wrongful termination and infliction of emotional distress.”
According to the lawsuit, Home Depot “failed to back up this longtime employee, who is now 72, when she was face-to-face with a thief” and instead used this incident as an excuse to fire her “like trash.”
The lawsuit accused Home Depot of disregarding “employee safety at a time when smash-and-grab robberies were rampant.”
According to the lawsuit, on July 14, 2023, Acevedo was working as a cashier at the Garden Center when she assisted a customer in purchasing an item. While assisting the customer, Acevedo noticed that the back of the debit card had instructions on how to “process payments as cash payments.”
When the customer returned and wanted to buy more expensive items, Acevedo, because she was uncomfortable performing those transactions, “tried to call her manager or other head cashier for assistance, but no one answered,” the lawsuit stated.
The lawsuit stated, according to Chambord Benton-Hayes, that the customer responded with aggression and told her “‘don’t call them’ and menacingly leaned over, as if preparing to strike her.”
Prior to being terminated from her job, Acevedo had “complained to management… that a newly hired teenager received a higher wage than her,” stated Chambord Benton-Hayes, of Benton Employment Law.
In fact, according to a survey by AARP, “60 percent of older workers have experienced age discrimination in the workplace.”
As a result, Acevedo received a bump in pay but Home Depot failed to inform her “of the result of any investigation of her legally protected complaint of age discrimination,” the lawsuit stated.
Attorney Benton-Hayes stated, “Ms. Acevedo got caught between a thief using intimidation to take merchandise and a management team looking for any excuse to fire” despite following company protocol.
Attorney Benton-Hayes asserted the real reason Acevedo was fired was because “she had the temerity to complain of wage discrimination.”
The lawsuit seeks to obtain past and future compensation at trial.
