A former Morgan Stanley employee is suing the much-vaunted financial services firm for discrimination, citing “cruel” in-house videos starring executives mocking minorities and the disabled as examples of the company’s toxic and callous work environment, the New York Daily News reports.
Robert Zengotita , a former events manager at Morgan Stanley, says the firm’s managers refused to give promote during his nine years at the company due to his ethnic origin (he is Puerto Rican.)
He says he was wrongly fired by Morgan Stanley in December 2015 after complaining, according to the court papers filed in Manhattan’s Federal Court.
In the lawsuit, he also points to a number of corporate videos circulated among employees, saying they exemplify the company’s “callous” and “discriminatory” atmosphere and the kind of bias executives promoted within their higher ranks.
One of them is a spoof of the 80s box office hit ‘Rain Man’ starring Dustin Hoffman playing an autistic genius alongside Tom Cruise.
“Commonly referred to as the ‘Rain Man Video'” according to Zengotita, the clip features Morgan Stanley’s head of wealth management Andy Saperstein in the role of Dustin Hoffman and allegedly mocks “the disabled.”
The lawsuit also cites a spoof video of the popular “The Hunger Games” movies featuring several “employees fighting to the death to keep their job” in a match similar to that depicted the series.
The 10-minute video, “Margin Games: Manager on Fire,” was produced as entertainment for a meeting, with most characters being played by senior executives from wealth management.
The video was eventually shelved and never shown in the meeting — reportedly due to concerns from personnel about scenes featuring jokes promoting racial stereotypes (in one of them an Asian woman is portrayed as a martial arts expert who pulls knitting needles from her hair to throw them at a dart board ) — but a copy of it was leaked online in February.
According to Zengotita, the fact that the video was released while the company was laying off staff shows the lack of congeniality between staff and detachment of executives from other employees.
The lawsuit says another one of these videos repeatedly refers to an employee of Hispanic descent as a “crazy Latina.”
“It was a degrading video for Latinos,” Zengotita says.
A spokesman at Morgan Stanley said he could not immediately locate the videos in question and declined to comment on behalf of Saperstein regarding the alleged mockery.
But the company did release a statement assuring it “is fully committed to an inclusive corporate culture that respects our diverse, multicultural workforce.”
“This complaint mischaracterizes both our work environment in general and specific events, including videos. We look forward to addressing this case on its merits in litigation,” the statement said.
Zengotita is seeking unspecified damages. But the financial firm’s alleged cut-throat and “callous” culture is not apparently not enough to put him off wealth management altogether — he is also asking for his job back.