Photos: SARAH J. GLOVER / Staff photographer
Workers at the Northwest Transfer Station say they read "Runaway Slaves," found in trash, for inspiration.
- Discrimination alleged at city facility
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By GLORIA CAMPISI campisg@phillynews.com 215-854-5935
IT MAY BE the ultimate indignity.
Lawrence "Lonnie" Powell, 58, a semiskilled laborer at the city's Northwest Transfer Station, in Roxborough, said that since he began working at the trash-handling plant in 2003 he has had to seek the superintendent's permission to go to the bathroom — then descend five flights of stairs to use it.
Powell, who is black, said that white employees have been permitted to use a bathroom just 25 feet from his work station.
"On several occasions I've actually defecated on myself, trying to get down to the bathroom," said Powell, who operates a machine that packs trash into tractor-trailers to be taken to landfills.
Powell is one of five current and former employees, all in their 50s, who allege, in legal documents and interviews with the Daily News, that the station's white superintendent has discriminated against them because they are black.
The superintendent, John Gill, has not responded substantively to Daily News requests for comment.
Clarena I.W. Tolson, commissioner of the city's Streets Department, which runs the station, declined to discuss the matter and referred questions to the City Solicitor's Office.
An assistant city solicitor has denied the black workers' allegations.
Separate facilities alleged
Among those allegations is that for several years Gill has kept a "supervisor's bathroom," one flight up from Gill's office, that "only the white employees were allowed to use...whether or not they were supervisors," Powell wrote in an affidavit last month.
"Quite often, while I'm up there, I could be sitting in my booth, and I see white guys going into the bathroom," Powell said in an interview. "They walk right by the door and go right in the bathroom there. That's maybe 25 feet away from where I'm at."
But when he has to go to the bathroom, he said, he has to go down to Gill's office to get permission, then descend five more flights.
Two other black workers, Gibson Trowery, 55, and Leslie Young Jr., 51, filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission in October 2007 and a lawsuit in January alleging discrimination by the city and infliction of extreme emotional distress by Gill.
Howard K. Trubman, a Center City attorney representing the black workers at the station, said that the law permits Trowery and Young to take their case to court because the PHRC did not rule within a year.
But black workers had complained in writing about what they considered racism at the station as far back as 1999, Young and Trubman said.
In August 2007, Powell aired the black employees' grievances in a meeting with Gill and Streets Department Deputy Commissioner Carlton Williams, who then ordered Gill to open the supervisor's bathroom to everyone, court documents show.
That meeting came three days after a job action on Aug. 17, 2007, in which no African-American employees at the station reported for work. The workers still refer to the protest as "Black Friday."
Powell said that he later saw a black employee, who had been promoted to a supervisory position, using the "supervisor's bathroom" several times.
But that didn't last, and that employee went back to driving a truck, Trubman said.
"Today the door of that so-called supervisor bathroom is locked," Powell wrote in his June 29 affidavit, prepared for a racial-discrimination complaint that he filed last month with the PHRC. In the affidavit, he named four white employees who had used that bathroom.
Water cooler in the closet The building in which the men work, located up the hill from the Schuylkill at Domino Lane and Umbria Street, had been the city's Northwest Incinerator — the outside wall still calls it that — until the city switched from a trash-burning system several years ago.
Young drove tractor-trailers filled with trash from the station to landfills until he was placed on medical disability because of an on-the-job injury last year.
In their PHRC complaint and their lawsuit, Young and Trowery — who has the same duties as Young, both men earning $40,882 a year as of last November, according to city records — alleged that a water cooler in the station's scale room had been moved into a dirty closet where the heater is located, and chained to a beam.
Young, who was a union shop steward at the time, said that this happened during a 95-degree heat wave in 2007. He said that Gill told him that the workers were drinking too much water.
