She broke the same rule and walked away - that was the detail the court could not ignore
An Aramark barista fired for a uniform violation his female coworker got away with can press his discrimination case forward.
The US District Court for the District of Columbia delivered a split decision on September 21, dismissing all claims against Georgetown University but allowing sex discrimination and retaliation claims against Aramark to proceed. The worker's union, UNITE HERE Local 23, also shed most claims brought against it.
The worker joined Aramark at Georgetown in August 2023. When he returned from approved Family and Medical Leave Act leave the following spring, his employer delayed his reinstatement by two weeks and moved him from barista to a lower-paying cashier role. A female coworker with less seniority and no barista experience picked up his shifts.
That sequence gave the court enough to let a sex discrimination claim through. So did what happened at the end. On January 23, 2025, the worker was terminated for the third time in five months - this time for obscuring his uniform logo. Less than a week earlier, a female coworker had done the same thing without reprimand.
Two retaliation claims also cleared the bar. The demotion and delayed return came on the heels of a reasonable accommodation request - protected activity under DC's Human Rights Act. The worker's first termination, on August 29, 2024, landed weeks after he filed discrimination grievances and raised the issue at a formal step meeting.
Not everything stuck. Race and disability discrimination claims were tossed for lack of specificity. A hostile work environment theory fell on the same ground. An emotional distress claim, which tried to connect his termination to a later car accident and a friend's fatal shooting, was dismissed as too remote.
Georgetown walked free. One representative at one termination meeting did not amount to the hands-on control over Aramark's workforce that liability requires, the court held. A whistleblower claim failed because DC's Whistleblower Protection Act applies only to government employees.
The case also produced a procedural curveball. Allegations that Aramark steered overtime and shift assignments to Hispanic temporary workers and female staff were converted into a federal labor claim, since they turned on interpretation of the collective bargaining agreement.
For HR professionals managing outsourced teams, the practical signal is plain: even where labor-law preemption swallows CBA-based grievances whole, a single comparator can keep a standalone discrimination claim alive.
