Kelly Services case goes to jury

Lynn Noyes lost a promotion with Kelly Services because she wasn't a Fellowship of Friends member, her attorney told jurors.

But Kelly Services said facts don't support the workplace discrimination lawsuit Noyes filed.

"We live in a culture of blame, don't we?" asked Kelly Services attorney E. Joseph Connaughton. "The coffee's too hot, there's a lawsuit. Our kid doesn't make the sports team, there's a lawsuit."

"We have juries who can say, 'Enough is enough,'" Connaughton continued, asking jurors during his closing argument Thursday in the federal court case in Sacramento to find that Nevada City resident Noyes, 59, was dealt with fairly at work by her office manager, then a member of the Yuba County-based Fellowship.

Attorney M. Catherine Jones, representing Noyes, said her client should have been promoted to software development manager and that Kelly Services "needs to be punished" for its indifference to Noyes workplace rights. Jones said Fellowship members were favored in hiring, promotion and pay at the Nevada City office where Noyes worked.

"No matter how good you were at your job," Noyes had said, "It didn't matter. The jobs were going to go Fellowship members."

"I'm an outsider because I don't belong," Noyes had said.

She had sought $1.2 million from Michigan-based Kelly Services to settle the case.

Noyes wept in court after her attorney finished telling jurors of the repeated workplace discrimination Noyes said she faced because she wasn't a Fellowship member, as many of her co-workers were.

The Fellowship, which has disputed Noyes assertion of workplace discrimination, is not named in the lawsuit.

Attorney Connaughton said office manager and Fellowship member William Heinz acted fairly in 2001 when another Fellowship member was named to the software development manager job Noyes had sought.

"I told you at the outset that I would show you the story of a man who tried to do the right thing," the attorney for Kelly Services said of Heinz.

"Now it's time for you to do the right thing," Connaughton told jurors.

The federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2007 ruling reversing a Sacramento federal court's dismissal of the case, describes the Fellowship as "a small religious group" and notes the Fellowship characterizes itself as a "way of life." About 2,000 people are members, according to the federal court ruling, and about one-third live on Fellowship-owned property in the Oregon House area.

Noyes and other employees in the Nevada City office of Kelly Services were laid off in 2004 and the office was closed the next year.

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Ryan McCarthy at 749-4707 or rmccarthy@appeal-democrat.com