City manager: "Navajos are lazy"

Discrimination Complaint Trial Set for Alleged Native Racial RemarksSalazar contends that at a meeting in 2007 with Flannery, her second-level supervisor, he expressed surprise that she had hired a Navajo woman for a city job and that the woman, “took the initiative to apply for the position.”

He asked Salazar “if she was familiar with Navajos,” and when she indicated she was not, he “explained that when he was a deputy county manager for Coconino County, Arizona, he worked with several Navajos” and is alleged to have said that “Navajos are lazy and that keeping up ‘clean’ appearances was not a priority for Navajo people.”

She charges discrimination and retaliation based upon gender as well as for her support for the Navajo employee and for her marriage to Frank Salazar, a Hispanic person.

After Salazar exhausted federal and state administrative remedies, she filed suit, contending that before her complaint of discrimination she “had never been disciplined or received a corrective action” but was told “that she was being terminated from her employment if she did not resign” and was fired two weeks later, according to her complaint.Comment:  For more racism on the job, see Native Employee Taunted with Hanging Doll.