San Leandro Solar Company Sued for Refusing to Serve People With Indian, Middle Eastern Names

A federal workplace civil rights watchdog is suing San Leandro-based Fidelity Home Energy for allegedly creating a hostile work environment where employees were required to refuse to work with clients of certain backgrounds.

The lawsuit was filed in a California federal court on Thursday by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Ayesha Faiz, who started working at Fidelity in November 2015 as a sales supervisor. It was then, she says, that her supervisor explained the company’s policy of not taking on customers with Middle Eastern or Indian last names.

In the suit, Faiz — who is of Afghan descent — alleges that she was instructed to Google last names of potential customers to assess their national origin.

“It was a horrible thing to go through,” Faiz said.

After the company decided a client was Middle Eastern or Indian, Faiz says employees checked an “Ethnicity” box on an internal “Do Not Call” list. If an appointment had already been made, then employees would cancel, offering follow-up that would never come.

Faiz says entries in the company’s internal database for names that appeared Middle Eastern or Indian included comments such as “Not Qualified,” “We Won’t Run This” or “Indian Name!” She alleges one employee even had a Post-it note on their computer with the words “No Indians.”

Fidelity Home Energy did not respond to requests for comment, but a lawyer for the company told the San Jose Mercury News that it denies Faiz’s allegations.

Faiz says she repeatedly asked her supervisors why some nationalities were denied service, but never got a clear answer. Less than a month after starting at Fidelity, Faiz left the company.

“I mean, it made me feel like I wasn’t human,” said Faiz, who said she was raised by her father to be proud of her heritage. “Am I a subclass human? Should I hide what I am?”

According to the suit, being forced to adhere to the company’s alleged discriminatory policy caused Faiz “considerable distress and anxiety, particularly since many of the people targeted by the policy had last names shared by members of her own family and community.”

Faiz says the company assumed she was Latina at first, but when she couldn’t speak Spanish to a client, her coworkers started asking questions about her family’s origin, at which point she revealed that her family was from Afghanistan.

While mainly identifying as Middle Eastern, Faiz was doubly-impacted by the alleged discrimination. She was born in Pakistan after her family fled Afghanistan following its invasion by the Soviet Union.

The EEOC’s suit is seeking lost wages and punitive damages for Faiz. It’s also asking the court to force Fidelity to repeal its policy and “institute and carry out policies, practices, and programs which provide equal employment opportunities for workers of Afghan, Middle Eastern or Indian descent.”