Boss slashed gay worker’s salary to level pay with ‘other females’: suit
The owner of an event company that’s worked for Spotify, Amazon, Twitter, H&M and Nike slashed a gay man’s salary in half as he compared him to a woman — before firing the man two weeks later, according to a new lawsuit.
Wesley Wernecke, 32, says he started working at Eventique as a Senior Producer on June 3 after he was recruited from Boston, his Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit says.
During a meeting, a week into working at the company — which also has offices in London and Dubai — Wernecke shared that he was gay when asked by another coworker about his “flashy” and “girly” wedding ring.
“So what does your wife’s ring look like?” the colleague continued. Wernecke responded that his partner, Evan, has a similar ring, according to the court papers filed Wednesday.
Wernecke says his boss, Eventique owner Henry “Liron” David, who was present at the time, began alienating him by excluding him from conferences, drinks with “the fellas” and from new business, according to the suit.
“David took all these tactics to exclude Wernecke because David had already made up his mind that, despite the proficiency of Wernecke’s work, he would not accept having an openly gay man working in the office, and he intended to get rid of Wernecke,” the court documents allege.
After just over three months working at Eventique David told Wernecke on Sept. 20 that he’d be lowering his salary from $145,000 to $70,000.
“I couldn’t sleep at night thinking you were being paid so much more than the other females in the office,” he said, according to court documents.
“David’s reference to Wernecke as one of the ‘females in the office’ was intended, again, to reinforce Wernecke’s understanding that David considered Wernecke to be a sexual deviant and unfit to work at Eventique,” the lawsuit charges.
Wernecke discovered his new salary was actually set even lower to $58,000, the court papers say. Two weeks later, on Oct. 4, David fired Wernecke on the pretense that he couldn’t afford to keep him citing “errors” and “deficiencies” in his work performance, the court documents say.
The poor treatment drove Wernecke to start seeing a psychiatrist for the first time in his life, the court papers say.
Wernecke’s lawyer, Anthony Consiglio of firm Cary Kane, said his client is an “accomplished marketing director and producer of live events.”
Wesley was “aggressively” recruited to the job, Consiglio said, adding, “About a week and a half after Wesley began work in the office, the employer learned he is gay, and then immediately began systematically shutting him out of the job.”
“These acts cannot be reconciled with the liberal anti-discrimination positions written into law in New York City and State to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender people in their workplaces,” Consiglio said.
David did not immediately return requests for comment.
via: https://nypost.com/2019/11/13/boss-slashed-gay-workers-salary-to-level-pay-with-other-females-suit/
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