Court upholds $300,000 award for former U-Haul worker

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday announced it would not review a June 1999 decision by a federal judge in Bangor awarding former U-Haul employee Karen Romano $300,000 for sex discrimination.

Romano, now 35, had sued U-Haul Co. of Maine and its parent company, U-Haul International, when she was fired in May 1996 two weeks after she was hired as a customer-service specialist in the company’s Waterville branch. Her duties included being trained to install trailer hitches.

At the time of her discharge, the Waterville U-Haul Center manager had told Romano that upper management had ordered her termination because, “You sit when you pee.”

A federal jury awarded Romano $640,000 in damages in a June 1999 verdict. The award subsequently was reduced to $300,000, the cap placed on most civil rights actions.

U-Haul appealed the verdict, but in December 2000 the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld the Bangor federal court’s decision.

In May 2001, U-Haul sought review of the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a prepared statement, Romano’s attorney, Jeffrey Young of Topsham, said the Supreme Court’s decision “marks the end of a very long road for Karen Romano.”

U-Haul “discriminatorily terminated my client because it did not believe that a woman could successfully work as a hitch mechanic. … The jury properly punished U-Haul for its sexist thinking,” Young stated.

The attorney said U-Haul “needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”