A Latino former employee of a Trader Joe’s store in Rancho Palos Verdes, where a customer’s 2020 dispute with the staff over her refusal to wear a face mask was widely seen on YouTube.com, has settled his lawsuit against the grocery chain connecting his firing to his criticisms of an alleged lax management attitude toward the COVID-19 pandemic.
A minute order issued by the clerk for Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Anne Richardson on Tuesday stated that the judge was recently notified by email of the accord obtained in plaintiff Adan Deloza’s case. She canceled a scheduled Dec. 5 trial. No terms were divulged.
Deloza maintained that he was fired for complaining about the allegedly lax attitude store manager Cynthia Evink had toward the coronavirus, saying he and his colleagues were criticized for asking the irate maskless customer to leave. In their court papers, Trader Joe’s attorneys said Deloza “openly disagreed with leadership decisions on how the company handled and enforced its COVID-19 policies, couching many of his disagreements in slanderous and baseless accusations that Trader Joe’s COVID-19 safety efforts were in support of white supremacy.”
Deloza was hired as a crew member in December 2019 and soon was performing many duties of a manager, including putting up store displays, making purchase orders and creating various recipes for the kitchen, according to his court papers.
The customer who objected to wearing a mask entered the Hawthorne Boulevard store in May 2020 and recorded her interactions with several employees, saying the coronavirus had a 99% survival rate. The video was later uploaded on YouTube.com.
“You’re all wearing masks like sheep,” she said. “This cannot be the new normal and it’s disgusting.”
She said she did not want to wear a mask because she would be breathing her own carbon dioxide, an opinion she maintained was held by many infectious disease experts.
Later, the woman told a customer in the parking lot, “This is America, dude, you look like an idiot with that mask on. Why are you allowing the government to control you?”
According to Deloza’s lawsuit filed in April 2021, Evink did not back up the staff in the aftermath of their interactions with the angry patron.
“Immediately following this video, all of the employees at Trader Joe’s, including Mr. Deloza, were reprimanded by Cynthia for making the maskless customer leave rather than simply letting her shop without a mask against the state and federal mandates,” the suit alleged.
The plaintiff alleges the Rancho Palos Verdes location repeatedly allowed customers to shop without a mask, failed to limit the number of customers inside the store to allow for social distancing and did not allow workers to conduct additional front-of-store sanitation, “all to the severe detriment of their employees’ and customers’ health and safety.”
Evink initially refused to allow Deloza and the other employees to wear masks or gloves, saying doing so would ruin the friendly environment of the store, according to the suit, which also alleged that Evink often spoke of her disbelief in the existence and severity of the COVID-19 virus.
Deloza was fired in June 2020. His termination letter “blatantly explains that Mr. Deloza was terminated due to his complaints regarding Trader Joe’s failure to follow COVID-19 requirements” and the correspondence demonstrates that Trader Joe’s management was more concerned with imposing its own beliefs about COVID-19 mandates than keeping employees safe, the suit alleges.