A group of 20 people fired by a Department of Energy cleanup contractor at the Oak Ridge Site filed a motion last week urging a federal district judge in Eastern Tennessee to reconsider his earlier ruling rejecting their request to join an ongoing lawsuit by three similar plaintiffs.
The former employees of Amentum-led UCOR filed a reconsideration motion Thursday. They want U.S. District Court Judge Travis McDonough to take a second look at their request to join the ongoing litigation involving plaintiffs Carlton Speer, Melana Dennis and Zachariah Duncan, who were also terminated after refusing COVID-19 vaccinations on religious grounds.
Judge McDonough’s decision earlier in February is “placing too much weight on the least significant factor — the time the suit has been pending — and presupposed prejudice to UCOR where no actual prejudice exists, while ignoring the very real prejudice Plaintiff-Intervenors will experience if forced to start over from scratch,” according to the Feb. 22 motion.
The lawsuit by the first three plaintiffs was filed in November 2022.
The former UCOR employees at Oak Ridge argue the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is typically more forgiving on allowing more plaintiffs to join litigation once a case is well underway.
As a backup, the larger group of plaintiffs in mid-February filed their own case against UCOR. They still argue that joining the pre-existing litigation by Speer makes more sense.
“Defendant [UCOR] insists it compiled each person’s name and other relevant factors on a single matrix — a spreadsheet — which it then used to deny every person’s requested religious accommodation,” according to the Feb. 22 filing. “The decisions were made at the same time by the same people. If the court is concerned about prejudicing UCOR, requiring new and piecemeal litigation would only undermine the court’s objective by causing more delay and expense, and thus prejudice, to UCOR, saying nothing of the delay and expense to plaintiff-Intervenors.”
In a separate COVID-19 termination lawsuit, UCOR is arguing before the Sixth Circuit that as a U.S. government contractor trying to maintain a healthy workforce it should enjoy sovereign immunity.
