In Brown v. Montefiore Medical Center, 19-CV-11474, 2022 WL 392313 (S.D.N.Y. February 9, 2022), the court, inter alia, denied plaintiff’s motion to amend his complaint – which alleged employment (race) discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation – to allege constructive discharge stemming from a hostile work environment claim. (In a prior decision, dated March 25, 2021, the court held that plaintiff’s hostile work environment claims survived defendant’s motion to dismiss.)
The court explained the black-letter law applicable to plaintiff’s constructive discharge claim:
Under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, an employee is constructively discharged when his employer, rather than discharging him directly, intentionally creates a work atmosphere so intolerable that he is forced to quit involuntarily. Courts generally break constructive discharge claims into two parts: “the employer’s intentional conduct and the intolerable level of work conditions. First, a plaintiff must show that the employer intended to create the intolerable workplace conditions. In order to demonstrate such intent, a plaintiff must allege something beyond mere negligence or ineffectiveness. The second part of a constructive discharge claim requires the plaintiff to prove that an objectively reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position would find his work conditions so intolerable as to compel resignation. This is a demanding standard, because constructive discharge cases ‘present a worse case harassment scenario, harassment ratcheted up to the breaking point. [Cleaned up.]
Here, the court had previously dismissed plaintiff’s constructive discharge allegations, since he did not “plausibly allege that Montefiore intentionally or deliberately created negative working conditions, because of his race, so as to compel him to resign.” [Cleaned up.] And while plaintiff added several allegations to support that claim, they were “either conclusory or provide no additional facts from which the Court can infer that Montefiore intentionally or deliberately created negative working conditions because of Brown’s race.”
The court then turned to plaintiff’s request to amend his hostile work environment claims to allege constructive discharge stemming from a hostile work environment, which it referred to as a “compound hostile-environment constructive discharge claim.” In order to proceed on such a claim, a plaintiff must “sufficiently allege a hostile work environment in order to adequately allege a constructive discharge claim.”
The court noted that “while the creation of a hostile work environment is a necessary predicate to a hostile-environment constructive discharge claim, sufficiently alleging a hostile work environment claim alone is not enough” and that “a compound hostile-environment constructive discharge claim is an aggravated case of hostile work environment and requires a plaintiff to show that an employer deliberately made working conditions so intolerable that the employee was forced into involuntary resignation.” [Cleaned up.]
Since plaintiff failed to cure the previously-noted deficiencies with his constructive discharge claim, and “because a compound hostile-environment constructive discharge claim similarly requires a plaintiff to show that the employer deliberately or intentionally created intolerable working conditions,” plaintiff’s proposed amendment of his hostile work environment claims would be futile.