They Showed Up to Work. Glow Networks Treated Them as Suspects.

Glow Networks is an IT company contracted to upgrade Nokia’s cell tower infrastructure from 4G to 5G technology. The company hired a workforce of Tier 1 and Tier 2 engineers and team leads to execute that contract in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. The overwhelming majority of those workers were Black.

According to testimony given at trial, Glow Networks ran two separate workplaces inside the same building. Black employees were required to sit in rooms equipped with security cameras. Black employees faced stricter enforcement of tardiness rules, cellphone bans, break policies, and overtime allocations. Management assigned Black workers heavier workloads while white employees worked lighter schedules.

When workers sat wherever they chose, the court record shows employees naturally self-segregated by race — and Black workers generally ended up in rooms without cameras. Glow then instituted an assigned-seating policy that moved Black workers into the camera-monitored rooms, which the company later claimed was done to desegregate the floor. The workers saw it for what it was: surveillance.

The Names Behind This Case

These are not abstractions. Thirteen real people put their names on this lawsuit and described, under oath, what Glow Networks did to them:

• Joshua Yarbrough
• Matt Lofland
• Joshua Walker
• Brandon Price
• Michael Brown
• Brett Samuels
• Sterling Vicks
• Adawale Ashiru
• Osasu William Saigheyisi
• Harom Pringle
• Rukevwe Ologban
• Peter Tijani
• Lee Green
• Paul Tijani

With the sole exception of Matt Lofland, who is white, every plaintiff is a Black former employee. They sued Glow Networks and its parent company, SlashSupport, Incorporated, under 42 U.S.C. § 1981 — the federal civil rights law that prohibits racial discrimination in employment contracts.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What No Dollar Amount Can Measure

The words these workers chose to describe their experience at Glow Networks are not legal language. They are the language of survival and trauma. One plaintiff told the court that working at Glow felt like “being raped.” Another called it the “new slavery.” These are not hyperbolic complaints drafted by attorneys — they are the unfiltered words of Black men trying to describe what it feels like to show up to work every day as a second-class citizen inside a company that profits from your labor while treating your humanity as an inconvenience.

The surveillance camera policy sits at the center of this story because it illustrates exactly how racial control works in a modern corporate environment. Glow did not hang a sign that said “Black employees sit here.” Instead, management used the neutral-sounding language of “assigned seating” and “desegregation” to move Black workers into the rooms that were already wired for surveillance. The workers ended up watched. The company got to call it a diversity initiative. That maneuver — weaponizing the language of inclusion to achieve exclusion — is a specific kind of cruelty that leaves marks you cannot see on a spreadsheet.

Joshua Yarbrough was hired as a Tier 2 engineer in 2017 and earned a promotion to lead the QA team within six months. That is not a story of someone who coasted — that is a story of someone who excelled. Then Glow reassigned him to Tier 1 duties, the entry-level work, while an Asian colleague took over his QA responsibilities. Yarbrough’s pay and title stayed the same on paper, which is precisely how the court dismissed his claim. But anyone who has ever been passed over, pushed aside, or quietly sidelined at work knows that a demotion without a pay cut is still a demotion. The humiliation is the point.

Joshua Walker wanted a promotion. His supervisor, Sandeep Pauddar, testified that Walker “wasn’t ready.” Yarbrough, who worked alongside Walker and watched him every day, testified that Walker absolutely deserved it. The court sided with the manager. But the court also told Walker that his own belief he had been discriminated against was “subjective” and therefore legally worthless. The message delivered to Walker — and to every Black worker in that building — was that their lived experience of discrimination counted for nothing unless they could produce a document in which a manager confessed to racism in writing. That standard does not exist for white workers whose promotions are denied. That standard exists specifically to make discrimination claims by Black workers nearly impossible to prove.

Legal Receipts: The Court’s Own Words Convict the System

“One plaintiff likened his experience to ‘being raped’; another called it the ‘new slavery.'” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-40421, September 16, 2025 (describing plaintiff testimony at trial)

“Aside from conclusory and unsubstantiated assertions, there was no evidence that black employees were treated differently. . . . And apart from feelings of discrimination, there was no evidence that any different treatment was race-based. Feelings are not competent evidence.” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-40421, affirming JMOL on discrimination claims

“Don’t lay off any white people.” — Debbie Cahoon, HR Manager at Glow Networks, as quoted by plaintiffs Harom Pringle and Michael Brown in their testimony regarding the layoff decisions

“Debbie, that is racist. . . . I am not making any decisions . . . based on [whether] somebody is white or black, or anything.” — Sandeep Pauddar, Glow Networks manager and layoff decisionmaker, responding to the HR manager’s comment (the court used this response to dismiss the HR manager’s statement as a “stray remark”)

“His exit report listed performance evaluations of ‘Unsatisfactory’ across the board and stated that he was fired on March 8, 2018, for playing Candy Crush during working hours.” — Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 24-40421, summarizing Glow’s stated justification for terminating plaintiff Osasu William Saigheyisi (Aigheyisi)

Societal Impact: This Case Is Bigger Than Glow Networks

Economic Inequality: The Verdict That Proved Racism Pays

A jury of twelve ordinary people heard the full evidence and concluded that Glow Networks discriminated against its Black workers. They awarded $63 million ($63 million — roughly the equivalent of 1,260 average American workers’ entire annual salaries, combined) as punishment and compensation. That number was not chosen randomly — it reflects twelve people’s collective judgment that the harm was serious and that the company needed to feel a financial consequence.

A single federal judge then overrode that verdict through a procedural mechanism called Judgment as a Matter of Law, determining that the jury’s conclusion was unreasonable. The workers received nothing. The message to every American employer is clear: a jury finding of racial discrimination can be reversed by a judge who applies a higher evidentiary standard than the jury was required to meet. Discrimination, when it is institutional rather than explicit, is effectively legal.

The economic stakes compound over time. Joshua Yarbrough earned a promotion within six months of being hired and led a QA team. He was then removed from that role — without a pay cut, which allowed Glow to claim there was no adverse action — and an Asian colleague took over his responsibilities. Every month Yarbrough spent in a lower-function role was income, career advancement, and professional credibility that he cannot recover. Multiply that across thirteen workers, across multiple years, and the real economic damage dwarfs even the $63 million ($63 million — enough to give each of the 13 plaintiffs $4.8 million each) the jury tried to award.

Brandon Price’s situation adds another layer to the economic injury. The court record notes that Price was terminated when he became “unable to perform job duties” that required him to spend his own personal money to live in Los Angeles and to use his own vehicle and his own gas for work purposes. Glow Networks required this worker to self-fund his employment — and then fired him when he could no longer afford to do so. The court found this “had nothing to do with race.” Working-class people know exactly what it looks like when a company extracts free labor and personal resources from its lowest-paid workers until those workers are financially depleted and then discards them.

Public Health: Psychological Harm Is Real Harm

The jury awarded each of the nine prevailing plaintiffs $3 million ($3 million — roughly the cost of mental health therapy for 600 people for an entire year) specifically for emotional distress. That category of damages exists in civil rights law precisely because legislators and courts have historically recognized that racial discrimination causes documented psychological harm: anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and trauma responses that do not end when the employment does.

When one plaintiff described his experience as “being raped” and another described it as “the new slavery,” they were communicating that the psychological damage was severe and dehumanizing. The court quoted those descriptions in its published opinion — and then upheld the erasure of the emotional distress awards. The legal system acknowledged the trauma in words and then refused to compensate it in dollars. That contradiction is its own form of institutional harm, one that will follow these thirteen workers for the rest of their lives.

Working in an environment where you are surveilled, singled out, and subjected to unequal rule enforcement every single day creates a state of chronic stress that researchers have directly linked to cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and shortened life expectancy. Racial workplace discrimination is a public health issue. The courts treated it as a paperwork problem.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

How the Legal Machine Grinds Workers Into Dust

The “Stray Remark” Doctrine: When Racist Words Don’t Count as Evidence

Harom Pringle and Michael Brown were laid off. Their only direct evidence of racial motive was a statement by Debbie Cahoon, Glow’s own HR manager, who allegedly said: “Don’t lay off any white people.” In most workplaces, the person responsible for human resources saying “don’t lay off any white people” during a layoff discussion would be considered relevant evidence of racial intent in those layoff decisions. The court called it a “stray remark” and ruled it legally insufficient.

The “stray remark” doctrine is a legal mechanism that allows courts to dismiss explicit statements of racial preference as long as the person making the statement was not the final decisionmaker. Sandeep Pauddar, the layoff decisionmaker, said he was not influenced by Cahoon’s comment and called it racist. The court cited Pauddar’s response as evidence the remark had no effect — and then pointed out that the new layoff list had more white employees on it than the old one. Pringle and Brown lost their jobs. The company’s HR manager told management not to lay off white people. The court found no connection.

The “But-For” Standard: A Bar Designed to Be Unreachable

Under the legal standard applied by both the district court and the Fifth Circuit, these workers could only win if they proved that race was the single determining cause of each adverse action — the “but-for” cause. This means a Black worker who was discriminated against partly because of race and partly because of workplace politics, personal animosity, or shifting business needs can still lose their case entirely. Racial bias that is one of several factors does not count.

The court also explicitly told these workers that their own testimony about their experiences constituted only “feelings” and “subjective beliefs,” which are “not competent evidence.” The combination of these two standards creates a situation where racial discrimination must be proven without relying on the testimony of the people who experienced it, without relying on statements by company officials that fall outside a narrow definition of “decisionmaker,” and without relying on circumstantial patterns unless they are statistically airtight. That is an evidentiary standard that does not exist in cases involving other types of fraud or corporate misconduct.

The Parent Company Walks Free

SlashSupport, Incorporated — the parent company that owned Glow Networks and had a senior executive installed at Glow’s headquarters — faced zero liability because the court found it was not an “integrated enterprise” with Glow. The test for integration focused almost exclusively on whether SlashSupport made final employment decisions. Since Glow’s own VP and managers handled hiring and firing, SlashSupport was legally insulated from everything its subsidiary did to these workers.

This is the corporate liability shell game in its purest form. A parent company benefits financially from a subsidiary’s operations, installs leadership at the subsidiary’s headquarters, and maintains ownership and financial control. When the subsidiary discriminates against its workers, the parent company’s carefully maintained structural separation lets it walk away clean. The workers cannot pierce that corporate veil through employment discrimination law, even when a jury believes they should be compensated.

Five Claims Survived: The Fight Is Not Fully Over

The Fifth Circuit did hand back one partial victory. The discrimination claims of Lee Green, Sterling Vicks, Brett Samuels, Brandon Price, and Rukevwe Ologban, along with the retaliation claim of Brett Samuels, were vacated and sent back to the lower court for new proceedings. The reason is significant: at the time those claims were originally dismissed at the summary judgment stage, the legal standard required workers to prove an “ultimate employment decision” — basically a firing or demotion — to even get to trial.

An en banc ruling in a separate case, Hamilton v. Dallas County, changed that standard. Adverse employment actions under civil rights law are now recognized as covering a broader range of workplace harm, not just formal termination events. The Fifth Circuit acknowledged this shift and sent those specific claims back so they can be evaluated under the updated, broader standard. These five workers now have another opportunity to present their cases.

For the remaining plaintiffs — those whose claims were dismissed at or after trial — the ruling is final unless they pursue further appeals or the Supreme Court takes up the broader evidentiary standards applied in this case. The $63 million ($63 million — enough to provide 9,000 American families with a full year of mortgage payments) verdict remains erased.