In Green v. District Council 1707, a Summary Order issued by the Second Circuit on April 17, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated a lower court’s order dismissing plaintiff’s race discrimination claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1981.
“To survive a motion to dismiss, a discrimination complaint need not allege facts establishing each element of a prima facie case of discrimination, but it must at a minimum assert nonconclusory factual matter sufficient to nudge[ ] [its] claims … across the line from conceivable to plausible.”
The court held that plaintiff “stated a claim of race discrimination under [42 U.S.C.] § 1981 because he plausibly alleged, among other things, that his supervisor consistently treated African American and Latino employees better than similarly situated Caucasian employees and that he was replaced by an African American.”
The court rejected the defendants’ alternative argument that the lower court correctly dismissed plaintiff’s amended complaint “because it pointed to legitimate, nondiscriminatory reasons for [plaintiff’s] termination” since “[w]hether there existed non-pretextual, non-discriminatory explanations for the defendants’ employment decisions … is not properly decided on a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim.”
This decision was not a total victory for plaintiff, however.
The court affirmed the dismissal of plaintiff’s race discrimination claim based on the alleged failure to pay him for unused vacation time (as plaintiff offered “only conclusory statements that the alleged denial of vacation pay was racially motivated”), and affirmed the dismissal of plaintiff’s ancestry discrimination claim (because plaintiff’s complaint failed to allege “that [plaintiff] suffered any adverse action on the basis of his ancestry” or “identify the ancestry or religious backgrounds of any of the purported comparators whom [plaintiff] asserts received more favorable treatment”).