In Amble v. City of Rockford Fire Dep’t., No. 3:22-CV-50196, 2026 WL 1846509 (N.D. Ill. June 26, 2026), the court, inter alia, granted defendant’s motion for summary judgment as to plaintiff’s constructive discharge claim.
Among other things, plaintiff alleged that she was subjected to a conversation about oral sex, found pornography in the restroom, and was subjected to multiple instances to “Sheena Bucks” (play money photoshopped with plaintiff’s image on it).
This decision illustrates the extremely high hurdle faced by those seeking to assert such a claim. From the decision:
To constitute a constructive discharge, Amble must effectively demonstrate that she was forced to resign because her working conditions, from the standpoint of a reasonable employee, had become unbearable. In cases of discriminatory harassment, the plaintiff is required to demonstrate a work environment even more egregious than the high standard for hostile work environment. Thorsen v. Cmty. Unit Sch. Dist. 300, No. 20-cv-50132, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 85530 (May 5, 2021) (referring to “can’t-take-it-anymore” claims). If a plaintiff successfully demonstrates constructive discharge, she must then also demonstrate discriminatory intent. Although Amble has produced enough evidence to present a claim for hostile work environment to a jury, the alleged harassment occurring at RFD is not outrageous enough to support a claim for constructive discharge as a matter of law. So, summary judgment is appropriate on this count and the Court need not reach the issue of discriminatory intent.
The Supreme Court has defined the constructive discharge analysis narrowly and succinctly: did working conditions become so intolerable that a reasonable person in the employee’s position would have felt compelled to resign? Historically, the Seventh Circuit has required intolerable conditions to involve severe and sustained harassment. This includes where a boss peppered a plaintiff with racist comments, brandished a pistol and held it to one plaintiff’s head and another where repeated instances of grossly offensive conduct and commentary culminated in a coworker showing the plaintiff a racist pornographic picture, telling her she was hired to perform the task in the photograph, grabbing the plaintiff, and threatening to kill her. In Suders itself, it involved the plaintiff’s coworkers violently intimidating her and scheming to have her arrested.
Rarely will an allegation of constructive discharge stand absent physical violence or threats of physical violence. When it does, the conduct is generally truly heinous and outrageous, involving unrelenting harassing events and complaints falling on deaf ears. Even at its low extreme, a finding of constructive discharge has required more than a dozen distinct episodes of harassment involving direct comments regarding the plaintiff’s buttocks, breasts, and miscarriage, amounting to a situation where continued employment would compromise the employee’s personal safety.
On the other hand, merely boorish behavior by coworkers is insufficient to establish constructive discharge. And a plaintiff who is placed on paid leave or temporarily reassigned pending an investigation isn’t constructively discharged if they choose to instead resign. This all makes sense, because employees are generally expected to remain employed while seeking redress, thereby allowing an employer to address a situation before it causes the employee to quit.
The work conditions Amble experienced in the five months predating her resignation weren’t indicative of a healthy working environment and indeed may have constituted a hostile work environment in violation of Title VII. At least, a reasonable jury could find so. But a reasonable jury couldn’t find that the working conditions presented by Amble were “intolerable” as defined by Seventh Circuit and Supreme Court precedent.
The facts presented by the parties—both those in dispute and not—have not demonstrated any threat or act of physical violence upon Amble. Moreover, the harassment she alleges is not the kind of extreme sexual harassment required as a matter of law to compromise her personal safety. One instance of finding pornographic magazines in a bathroom and two instances of finding photoshopped currency in addition to the conversation regarding oral sex are insufficient to amount to constructive discharge. Even taking all additional evidence and viewing all incidences of harassment in favor of Amble, there is simply an insufficient record to establish that her working conditions were intolerable as a matter of law.
(Cleaned up.)
Accordingly, the court held that summary judgment was warranted.