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96thdayofrage · 3 years

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In September the Reader was alerted to two complaints, one filed with the city's Commission on Human Relations and the other with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, detailing discrimination and racist statements made by high-level managers at Pangea, one of Chicago's biggest corporate landlords. Until the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the company was the city's most prolific filer of eviction cases. Its apartment holdings are concentrated largely in Black neighborhoods on the south and west sides of the city and in nearby suburbs, now totaling 9,400 units in 492 buildings. The company also has several thousand more units in Indianapolis and Baltimore.

The complaints were filed by Armando Magana, 45, the chief maintenance supervisor at Pangea in Chicago who'd been with the company since 2010. He's worked in various roles and received promotions and bonuses, most recently in February, Magana writes. "Notwithstanding my exceptional performance, Pangea has repeatedly discriminated against me because of my Hispanic ethnicity and my Mexican national origin. Throughout my employment, Pangea has also subjected me to a hostile work environment based on numerous derisive and derogatory statements made by Pangea's managers and executives regarding my ethnicity and national origin."

Magana's complaint includes several examples of such statements from vice president of operations Derek Reich and CEO Pete Martay. He claims that in 2017 Reich "told me that I should avoid being seen working with an African-American work colleague if I did not want to be viewed in the same way as that 'lazy nigger.'"

Magana details two occasions in 2018 when Reich "suggested hiring 'illegals' because they will accept less compensation," and resisted Magana's recommendations for which employees should get raises, allegedly saying, "'aren't these guys illegal?'"

Further in the complaints he recounts a 2019 meeting in which management for a newly acquired building near Loyola University on the north side was allegedly discussed. "My African American colleague asked, 'who will be managing the building,' to which Mr. Reich responded, 'they've never seen a Regional Manager of your kind in that area.' I asked about getting access to the roof top, to which Mr. Martay stated, 'Yeah I can imagine Armando showing up with his trash can and saying "Hello I'm Armando, the janitor here to clean up after you."'"

Later that year, Magana alleges he "met with Mr. Reich at a property that Pangea had recently begun to manage. During a discussion regarding employee staff assignments, Mr. Reich remarked that 'Mexicans are for custodial and maintenance, Blacks for property management, and Whites for the back office, that's it.'" The following month Magana alleges that Martay said to him, in front of other employees, "I should make you pull your fucking tools back out and make you clean shit out of the fucking tubs, like you used to."

Magana writes that he reported Martay's "derogatory comments" to Reich and both supervisors' comments to Pangea's HR manager Lori Bysong as well as the company's CFO Patrick Borchard and cofounder and former CEO Steve Joung. "Mr. Joung listened to me, then responded by saying that he doubted workplace discrimination was occurring."

Magana claims in the complaint that at the end of 2019 he also had a conversation with Pangea's operations manager Sean McQuade about hiring and pay for new workers, requesting $22/hour for one of them. "Mr. McQuade responded by asking 'Do you know if he's illegal? Do you think he has papers? . . . Do you think this guy is worth $22/hour?'" Again, Magana claims he reported these comments to HR, Pangea's in-house attorney Jennifer Dean, and other supervisors.

"Despite having complained on multiple occasions directly to multiple members of Pangea management, no one at the Company ever responded to, investigated, or otherwise communicated with me regarding my several complaints," Magana writes. "Rather, Mr. Reich continues to make derogatory, discriminatory comments toward me. Specifically, on May 12, 2020, Mr. Reich called me and stated, 'stop treating me like a shine. Last time I checked I was white.'"

In both an internal e-mail obtained by the Reader and in an e-mailed statement from CEO Pete Martay, Pangea has denied Magana's allegations and said he's refused to cooperate in the company's internal efforts to investigate.

"Pangea Properties has zero tolerance for racist or discriminatory behavior," Martay wrote to the Reader. "We take allegations of this nature very seriously. As a result, we hired a neutral investigator to carry out a prompt and thorough investigation and have also engaged legal representation to defend the company against allegations we believe are baseless. The complainant and his witnesses have refused multiple requests to participate in our investigation."

The Reader also presented the company with an opportunity to respond to additional allegations made by ten other current and former employees about Pangea's corporate culture. These included vivid descriptions of demeaning statements by Reich and other supervisors, as well as allegations of segregated and demeaning working conditions. "We categorically deny the claims in the complaint and also the statements made against us by former employees," wrote Martay. Neither Reich nor McQuade, whose conduct Magana also referenced in his complaint, responded to a request for comment.

Hostile work environments are both ubiquitous and difficult to reform. Their toxicity can be hard to pin down and prove on paper, especially when corporate promotions and official praise are interspersed with interpersonal disrespect and disregard. As a reckoning over the prejudices endemic to white-dominated workplaces roils the private and public sectors, employees of color from businesses and institutions as varied as Adidas, LinkedIn, Vogue, the San Francisco health department, and Loyola University have begun speaking out about the racial microaggressions, gaslighting, and harassment that defines office culture for them.

Even as he received glowing performance reviews, Magana could also feel hostility from management. For example, in an August 2013 e-mail obtained by the Reader, Reich wrote a brief note to another regional manager. The subject line read, "Armando was excited about converting to Islam . . . " and inside the body of the e-mail the sentence ended " . . . Until he found out you can't eat pork." Attached was a photo of Magana, grinning, in a little white hat reminiscent of a kufi skull cap.

When asked about the e-mail Magana said he was dismayed at being the target of a crude joke that appeared to be both Islamophobic and about his weight. "I never thought he was gonna take a picture and send it," he said with a grim chuckle as we looked at the image over beers at the nearly deserted patio of the Promontory in Hyde Park. Magana wore a black valve mask and a short sleeve blue polo, apparently unbothered by the biting gusts of wind on that late September afternoon. As he stared at the photo he said the fact that it had been e-mailed was unusual; in his experience Reich rarely left a paper trail of demeaning comments. "It was always phone calls with Derek," Magana said. "He really doesn't like to put anything in e-mail. If you send him an e-mail, he'll call. If you meet him in the field, he'll make those comments."

As documented in his complaints, Magana attempted to have the "discriminatory communications and behavior" he experienced addressed internally, but complaints to HR and leaders of the company didn't help. Finally he started working with attorney Marc Siegel to appeal to external authorities to intervene. The company soon also hired an outside attorney to help handle the situation.

Pangea's lawyers "kept telling [Siegel] that I was exaggerating and they always treated me good and they weren't being racist toward me," Magana told the Reader. "Long story short, I told my attorney I'm not gonna play this game, I'm gonna file this with the state and city and I'm gonna make it public."

By late spring the stress of working at Pangea had intensified due to the coronavirus pandemic. "I broke down because when the COVID started Derek was just calling me every other day, every other day: 'What are you doing?' I'd say 'We're working . . . but we don't have any sanitizing supplies. We don't have masks.'"

Magana said Pangea didn't offer hazard pay. Some field employees took time off because they were scared to go back into the apartment buildings, especially when word got around that tenants were falling ill. Magana says Reich didn't seem to care. "It was like, 'All these guys need to come back to work.' I'm like, 'Derek we're all working, there's some people who took off because they're scared.'"

Magana said that Reich demanded that he choose five of his staff to fire as part of a company effort to reduce the employee headcount to below 500 so that Pangea could qualify for a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal government.

He said that in late March Reich called him. "He says, 'You got any shitty people working for you? Give me five.' I'm like, 'I don't have any shitty people working for me.' He's like, 'Well, give me five.'"

The Reader obtained an e-mail Magana sent to Reich the next day, listing four employees who changed positions in the company without being replaced and one who was about to leave Pangea anyway. "There's your four plus one, he's already out the door," Magana recalled thinking. He said that after that he got another phone call from Reich who demanded he name five additional people to fire because Pangea's employee count was at 512.

Magana said he submitted another list of names. "I was destroyed about that," he said. According to records released by the Small Business Administration in July, Pangea was awarded a $5-$10 million loan through the PPP program. They listed an employee count of 494.

By June, Magana needed a break. The stress of the job was getting to him and affecting his family, and he took a leave of absence for a month and a half. "I got kind of depressed, stressed out, I was trying to take care of my health," he said. "I found out my son was depressed, so I had to dedicate myself to him."

Magana said things got worse for him at Pangea after he came back to work in July. There were sudden extra meetings where he was questioned about his work. He felt increasingly micromanaged.

Nevertheless, Magana was still determined to continue working at the company, where he was making $115,000 in salary, got bonuses, and to which he'd devoted a decade of his life. "I'm happy where I'm at, I'm good at what I do, I've done nothing wrong," he said.

Word about Magana's complaint began to get out at Pangea, and e-mails from pseudonymised accounts suddenly appeared in all field employees' inboxes, sharing Magana's complaints and encouraging them to file their own. The company quickly deleted these e-mails from employees' inboxes, however. In a September 30 e-mail to all field employees obtained by the Reader, Martay acknowledged that deletion, adding that the "current employee" who complained about mistreatment "refused to cooperate and will not speak to the independent investigator" Pangea hired to look into the allegations. Though Martay didn't refer to Magana by name in this e-mail, Magana says he felt the CEO's message was meant to undermine him. "We categorically deny the claims made in the complaint and have engaged legal representation to defend the company against them," Martay wrote.

By the beginning of October, Magana felt he could no longer remain at Pangea. "I cannot continue to work under hostile environment with retaliation," he wrote to me in a text message. Though he technically resigned from his job himself, his attorney argues that he was "constructively discharged" by management because of the "discrimination and harassment and retaliation he faced at work."

According to legal precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2006 Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White decision, the definition of retaliation for complaints about workplace discrimination is broad. "It could be making your work life more difficult. It could be micromanaging you. It could be icing you out—anything that could make a reasonable person feel dissuaded from bringing a complaint," said Siegel. "It doesn't have to be a termination or written suspension."

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