The former executive said she was fired after 19 years of employment for trying to increase diversity and make underrepresented employees’ voices heard.
Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama’s former top female Black employee has accused the Montgomery, Alabama, plant of race- and gender-based discrimination and retaliation in a lawsuit filed against the corporation Tuesday.
In the lawsuit, and in an exclusive interview with Road & Track, Yvette Gilkey-Shuford described a majority-Black production workforce at Hyundai’s U.S. factory, one managed predominantly by white and Korean men. She described her attempts to improve workplace diversity and representation as a pillar of her tenure, which began in 2003, before HMMA produced its first car. But, she said, her efforts also led to a “restructuring” that pushed her out of the company.
“We can call it what you want to call it, but I call it ‘I was fired,’” Gilkey-Shuford told Road & Track.
Gilkey-Shuford, the director of administration at HMMA, advised a group of LGBTQ+ employees on a memo the group created for Pride Month this year. The memo described a litany of issues that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans employees sought to address within the company, including voluntary name changes for trans employees. According to Gilkey-Shuford, the group sought her advice on the memo because she was regarded as a friendly ear.
The factory’s grand opening.
Brian Schoenhals/Getty
One member of the group of LGBTQ+ employees shared the memo with an employee at Hyundai Motors America (HMA), the California corporation that oversees Hyundai’s Alabama manufacturing arm. Gilkey-Shuford says that employee, the head of a resource group for LGBTQ+ employees, was alarmed by the memo’s contents. The HMA employee then shared it with other departments within Hyundai’s North American headquarters. Those who read it were reportedly alarmed by the policies of the Alabama-based manufacturing arm. As a result, Hyundai corporate expressed concern and dissatisfaction to plant leadership in Alabama. Gilkey-Shuford says plant leadership was likely angry that the memo ever got out to management in California. She believes that management, after learning she had advised on the memo—which she did not know would be shared with corporate—decided to restructure her department. The “restructuring” had exactly one effect: It eliminated Gilkey-Shuford’s position. She was not offered an alternative position, and the change was effective immediately.
Gilkey-Shuford says that in instances when other directors had broken rules or saw their positions eliminated, they were often reassigned. “But then I walk in, 19 years [at the company], all of this, and they said it’s ‘just a restructure’ and don’t restructure me to another position. . . . For whatever reason you have, why not? It’s retaliation,” Gilkey-Shuford told R&T. “What did I do? I just don’t understand. So that’s the thing that bothers me. I have no problem with the fact that you let me go. You let me go, and I did something wrong—just say that.”
Gilkey-Shuford, first in a complaint to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission earlier this year and now in this lawsuit, said Hyundai violated employment law by firing an employee in retaliation for attempting to reduce workplace discrimination. Her attorney, former U.S. Congressman Artur Davis, noted this is protected behavior under U.S. federal law. But Davis will not only have to prove that HMMA’s “restructuring” was a retaliatory firing, but also argue that advising on an anti-discrimination memo is itself protected behavior. Robert Burns, vice president of human resources & administration at HMMA, provided the following statement to Road & Track:
“Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Alabama respectfully disagrees with the claims outlined by the former employee. The claims will be vigorously defended with information presented during the litigation process.
HMMA provides a workplace free of discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship status, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, uniformed service member status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.”
Gilkey-Shuford also said the company stripped major responsibilities from the position when it was awarded to a Black woman. When a white man held the role, the responsibilities included overseeing the human-resources and team-relations departments. That meant the role had serious power over plant operations. But when that white man was promoted to the vice-president level, Gilkey-Shuford says he kept power over those departments, severely weakening her new role. This was despite that Gilkey-Shuford had on-the-line auto-production experience and strong relationships with team members, according to her and another employee.
Line workers at HMMA as they build Sonatas, the first model Hyundai produced in the U.S.
ROBERT SULLIVAN/Getty
Administration, Gilkey-Shuford explained, held most of the power in the plant. While she was director of assembly, Gilkey-Shuford was in name responsible for the team, but because administration was in charge of setting rules, procedures, holidays, and all workplace policies, her role was mostly “going across the street to the ‘White House’” to make the team’s case to the real power brokers within HMMA.
“So when they told me I was going to [be the head of] administration, I was like, okay—now, all of the fussing and fighting that we do with administration, I’ll be able to go over there and shine some light on some things, and let them understand what we’re up against in production, and why it’s so important to do X, Y, and Z, and why we do this, and all good stuff,” Gilkey-Shuford said.
“So in all of my team members’ eyes, which I knew 95 percent of them, that was the best thing. ‘Oh, Yvette, you’re going to administration—you can get this changed. We could work on that.’ That was all good until I get over there, and then I was told that my role was only going to be public relations, general affairs, and environment, health, and safety. . . . So those were the three areas that I was responsible for. I did not get team relations, and I did not get human resources,” she said.
Gilkey-Shuford, the sole woman and sole person of color on the 15-person executive team, also said she found herself iced out of key executive-level decision-making committees that had included Burns when he held her role. In one meeting Gilkey-Shuford was invited to, for which she was in charge of arranging catering as head of general affairs, the supplied coffee was not hot. The CEO wasn’t happy. Gilkey-Shuford pledged to ensure it wouldn’t happen again.
One fellow executive joked, “Your biggest role right now is to make sure you keep that coffee hot,” Gilkey-Shuford said.
Former President George H.W. Bush attends the ribbon cutting ceremony at the then-new Montgomery, Alabama plant.
Brian Schoenhals/Getty Images
Those fellow executives, Gilkey-Shuford says, also made $15,000 to $20,000 per year more than her, despite that she was one of the only two people on the executive team with an MBA. Gilkey-Shuford described a culture at HMMA in which few Black employees rose beyond middle management and white executives expressed disregard for conversations around diversity. In her history at the plant—which encompasses the entire operation of Hyundai’s U.S. manufacturing arm until her position’s elimination in 2021—Gilkey-Shuford said she saw attitudes toward diversity and inclusion get noticeably worse, even as Black employees fought for representation. Two sections of the lawsuit summarize what she perceives as the problem:
From the time HMMA broke ground in 2004 and opened production in 2005, the production and assembly labor force has been overwhelmingly African American, roughly eighty-five percent (85%). The first tiers of supervision have been racially diverse: nearly two-thirds of the two hundred (200) frontline supervisors, called Team Leaders, and nearly forty percent (40%) of the approximately seventy-five (75) Group Leaders, are black.
[Section] 23. But the path of advancement for black employees starts to narrow at the mid-management level. Out of approximately fifty (50) Assistant Managers at HMMA, only thirty percent (30%) are black. Out of approximately thirty (30) Managers at HMMA, only ten percent (10%) are black. The next tier of leadership,the prestigious Head of Department (“HOD”) role, is where black inclusion falls off the cliff. Inside the group of fifteen (15) to twenty (20), at any given time, the number of black HODs varies between zero (0) and one (1), and has apparently never exceeded two (2) at one time.
Asked whether this was true, Hyundai directed us to the previous statement noting that the company respectfully disagrees with Gilkey-Shuford’s claims. With her suit, Gilkey-Shuford hopes the company will be forced to take diversity more seriously.
“The fact is that being an African American woman in a male-dominant industry is big,” Gilkey-Shuford said. “It takes a whole lot to do that and 19 years of it. I didn’t walk in and talk my way through. I worked hard to get where I was, and I have the scars on my back to prove that. I have the loyalty of the team members, the trust. That’s what’s so important, that HMMA, to me, seem to take like it’s not a big deal, is that trust of their team members. Because without them, there’s no us. So they have to understand that if it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have a Hyundai. Somehow, in between there, [HMMA is] not listening to that. They’re not listening to the voices of the team members. They hear it, but they’re not listening.”
Hyundai’s Alabama supply chain has been under scrutiny since Reuters discovered that a Hyundai subsidiary and supplier was allegedly using migrant-child labor in its factory. A second supplier, not owned by Hyundai, was charged—in court filings uncovered by Reuters—with also using child labor by the U.S. Department of Labor. In both cases, Hyundai provided variations of the following statement to Road & Track:
“Hyundai does not tolerate illegal employment practices in any Hyundai entity. We have policies and procedures in place that require compliance with all local, state, and federal laws.”
Keyword: Exclusive: Hyundai Alabama’s Former Top Black Female Exec Sues Over Racism and Retaliation