American Express Slapped With Lawsuit Alleging Discrimination Against White Employees

A former American Express employee filed a class-action complaint Tuesday alleging that the credit card company exhibited “callous indifference” to civil rights law by terminating him because he is White and because he spoke out against its “racially discriminatory” policies.

Brian Netzel, who worked a decade for Amex until he was terminated in 2020, told FOX Business that he sued the company on behalf of himself and potentially thousands of other similarly situated employees following “an avalanche of bad things coming to White people in that company once George Floyd was killed.”

The lawsuit alleges that amid the racial tensions roiling the U.S. in 2020, Amex implemented “anti-racism” policies throughout its corporate structure that “gave preferential treatment to individuals for being Black and unambiguously signaled to White employees that their race was an impediment to getting ahead in the company.”

Netzel said such policies fostered a workplace rife with “a tremendous amount of animosity” in which White employees were unfairly punished or passed over for promotions, while some Black employees were promoted merely to meet racial quotas and employees were encouraged to “root out in McCarthy-era fashion people who didn’t agree with this overall philosophy.”

Netzel pinpointed the origin of such policies at the top, recalling company town halls in which CEO Stephen Squeri reportedly engaged in “what amounted to an emotional tirade against police, against systemic racism in the U.S. and within American Express.”

“He made it clear that you needed to fight this with him, or you needed to find another place to work,” Netzel said of Squeri, who assumed his current position at the company in 2018.

Netzel maintained that this created an atmosphere in which White employees were treated disparately and forced to undergo trainings in which they were told to treat Black coworkers differently.

“We weren’t allowed to talk before they talked in a meeting,” he said, adding that they were explicitly advised against things such as touching Black people’s hair, as if it were a frequent occurrence. {snip}

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Netzel alleged in his complaint that his female manager, who is Black, would “aggressively harass and berate White employees,” overworking them and retaliating with poor performance reviews. He also claims that Amex was aware of her behavior, and that she was one of the executives who received financial incentives to reduce the number of White people in her department.

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The lawsuit’s claims echo previous allegations of discrimination Amex has faced. In 2021, five current and former employees told FOX Business on condition of anonymity that the company engaged in “reverse discrimination” against White employees, barring them from promotions and steeping the workplace in the tenets of critical race theory. {snip}

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