A disagreement concerning overtime escalated into yelling and profanity, resulting in a police call and a two-day unpaid emergency leave for the employee.
Affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment against the Title VII discrimination, retaliation, and hostile work environment claims asserted by a postal carrier, the Seventh Circuit found his comparator evidence lacking, and determined that no reasonable jury could conclude that the emergency leave placement was attributable to his race or national origin, rather than the heated confrontation he had on the workroom floor with his supervisor. As to the retaliation claim, it was undisputed that the employee had filed several EEO complaints and had suffered an adverse action. However, his claim for suspicious timing concerned a complaint that was closed more than three years before the incident on the workroom floor, a gap too great to raise an inference of causation (Ismail v. Steiner, No. 25-1412 (7th Cir. Sept. 10, 2026)).
The employee in this case was born in Palestine and identifies as Middle Eastern. He worked as a postal carrier, and his shift would start with sorting the day’s deliveries on the workroom floor.
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