Employee’s Salary Halved After Coming Out
November 24, 2019Wesley Wernecke claims in a discrimination lawsuit against Eventique, a company that stages promotional events for companies including Nike, Twitter and Amazon, that his pay was cut to half after he came out in his workplace so he could be paid as much as “other females in the office”.
Wernecke says that his employers sought to “alienate and degrade him after they learned he was gay,” ‘The Guardian’ reports.
According to Wernecke a week after he was hired his co-workers started to mock his “girly” engagement ring asking him if his wife wore the same to which he replied that his partner, Evan, does.
Shortly after, he was summoned to CEO Henry Liron David’s office and was told that his salary was being cut by more than 50%, from $145,000 to $70,000.
“I couldn’t sleep at night thinking that you were being paid so much more than the other females in the office,” David is alleged to have told Wernecke. The CEO, the complaint alleges, “simply could not bear the thought that Eventique would continue to be represented by a gay man”.
“David took pains to mark Wernecke as different from the other employees through these physical demonstrations,” the complaint alleges. By October, he had been fired.
“Wesley was personally recruited by this employer to be a senior producer, and once [David] learned he was gay, the employer began shutting him out of the business,” said Wernecke’s lawyer Anthony Consiglio.
A lawyer for David and Eventique described the allegations as “baseless”.
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