Dive Brief:
- Seattle-based general contractor BNBuilders has fired three workers for their alleged involvement in placing a noose with a Black carpenter’s name at a Meta construction site in Redmond, Washington, according to local news outlet Kiro 7.
- Police have not said whether criminal charges will be filed in the case, but they are investigating the incident as a hate crime, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $100,000 fine.
- A 33-year-old Black carpenter who had been working at Meta’s Building X construction site reported finding the noose last month, along with one of his tools taped to the rope with his name written on it.
Dive Insight:
The termination of the three workers involved in placing the noose differs from how the majority of racist incidents on jobsites are resolved.
For example, Amazon and R.C. Anderesen offered a $100,000 reward for information about the perpetrator of several nooses placed on a fulfillment center construction site in Connecticut last year. No one stepped forward and the reward was never collected, according to an Amazon spokesperson. No arrests were ever made in the case.
But there are cases where workers are caught, and subsequently terminated immediately.
Earlier this month, the consortium running the $6.5 billion Uranium Processing Facility construction site at the federal Y-12 facility in Tennessee identified and fired a worker after tips from a $200,000 reward hotline connected the person to a noose discovered on site in June.
After spiking in 2020, the number of nooses reported on U.S. construction sites fell by about half to seven, according to data from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commision. But that remains the same number of reported incidents as in 2018 and 2019.
The incident marks at least the fourth alleged bias-related event at a Meta or Facebook construction site in the last two years.
BNBuilders did not respond to Construction Dive’s request for comment about the firings.
