Religious Intolerance Costs AT&T $5m

Kansas City, Missouri A former Kansas City woman who converted to Islam in 2005 said she was harassed for years at AT&T, and that the abuse boiled over in 2008 when her boss snatched her head scarf and exposed her hair.

A Jackson County jury on Thursday awarded Susann Bashir $5 million (Dh18.36 million) in punitive damages in her discrimination lawsuit, along with $120,000 in lost wages and other actual damages.

The Kansas City Star reported on Saturday that the award appears to be the largest jury verdict for a workplace discrimination case in Missouri’s history.

Bashir said in court documents that her work environment became hostile immediately after she converted, with her co-workers making harassing comments about her religion and referring to her hijab as “that thing on her head”.

“I was shocked. I thought, ‘What is going on?'” she told the newspaper. “Nobody ever cared what I wore before. Nobody ever cared what religion I was before.”

Bashir worked at AT&T’s Kansas City office for 10 years as a fibre optics network builder before being fired from her $70,000-a-year job. She claimed she endured religious discrimination nearly every day of the final three years she worked there, including being called a “towelhead” and a terrorist.