How the Plant Was Built to Fail Black Workers

The Kansas City plant did not become a hostile workplace by accident. The conditions that allowed racial terror to operate unchecked were built into the employment structure from the start.

• Harley-Davidson owned and operated the Kansas City manufacturing facility, which produced Harley equipment, parts, and merchandise. The majority of Harley’s direct employees at the plant were white.
• Harley contracted with Syncreon to supply a portion of the workforce. Approximately 90 percent of Syncreon’s employees at that plant were Black. This created a two-tier workforce divided almost entirely by race.
• Harley maintained the right to control Syncreon’s operations and employment decisions inside the plant. The Missouri Supreme Court found that “Syncreon’s business operations at the Plant were thoroughly entwined with and dependent on Harley.”
• A physical line ran through the plant floor. Black Syncreon employees were prohibited from crossing it. White Harley employees could cross freely. The court described this as a “physical racial division” that reinforced the racial hierarchy inside the facility.
• The bathrooms at the plant were, according to the petition, “functionally racially segregated.” These segregated bathrooms are the same spaces where nooses, racist graffiti, and a hanging Black doll were later discovered.
• Harley had at some point fired a white employee specifically for discriminating against Black workers at this same plant. Syncreon then hired that same man back and made him a supervisor over Syncreon’s predominantly Black workforce. Neither company stopped this from happening.

Two Years of Racial Terror, Incident by Incident

The petition filed by the 25 employees documents a specific and escalating sequence of racist incidents between 2017 and 2019. Nothing was investigated. Nobody was disciplined. The timeline below is drawn entirely from the Missouri Supreme Court’s factual summary.

• June/July 2017: A noose was found in the women’s bathroom. This is a symbol with one meaning in the American context: a death threat targeting Black people. No investigation followed.
• April 2018: A swastika appeared in the same women’s bathroom, alongside a doll of a Black woman hanging by a noose. This escalated from a symbolic death threat to a staged lynching effigy. Still no investigation, no discipline.
• November 2018: A Black female employee was physically assaulted by a male coworker. When she filed a written complaint with Syncreon’s human resources department, the HR representative threw the complaint in the trash and told the attacker to go back to work. The victim received nothing.
• December 2018: A white Syncreon employee displayed a family photo bordered by Confederate flags, with family members “depicting racist signs,” to coworkers including at least one Black employee. When the Black employee complained, they were told not to worry about it and to return to work.
• January 2019: Racist graffiti including swastikas and the phrases “N****** die” and “N****** go back to Africa” was found in a bathroom used by Syncreon’s predominantly Black workforce. The graffiti constituted explicit written death threats targeting Black employees by race.
• February 2019: More racist graffiti appeared in a Syncreon bathroom. Black employees photographed the graffiti. Management, either Syncreon’s or Harley’s, ordered those employees to delete the photos, destroying the evidence they had gathered of their own harassment.
• February 2019: A separate employee found a noose while working and reported it to Syncreon. A plant manager then told a plant supervisor to “dispose of it.” An employee witnessed the supervisor physically cutting the noose into pieces. When another employee later asked what investigation had taken place, they were falsely told the noose had been “given to forensics.”

“Harley and Syncreon did not investigate or issue any discipline for any racially motivated incident that occurred at the Plant, or otherwise attempt to prevent the occurrence of racially charged incidents at the Plant.”

Legal Receipts: What the Court Found, Verbatim

These are direct quotes from the Missouri Supreme Court’s January 30, 2024 opinion in Matthews et al. v. Harley-Davidson et al., Case No. SC100116. Nothing below is paraphrased.

• This proves the physical segregation of Black and white workers was a deliberate structural feature of the plant, maintained by Harley-Davidson’s own management decisions, not a random informal occurrence.
• The quote establishes that Harley controlled the space: who could go where, which bathrooms served which workers. The same bathrooms that were “functionally racially segregated” are the same spaces where nooses, swastikas, and death-threat graffiti were found.

• This proves the rehiring was not negligence; Harley-Davidson had already established that this specific individual was willing to discriminate against Black workers. The record of that prior termination existed. Syncreon hired him anyway to supervise the same population he had previously discriminated against.
• Both companies knew. Both companies allowed it. The court includes this fact in its summary of the hostile work environment pattern.

• This is evidence destruction. The court notes it cannot determine at the pleading stage whether it was Syncreon or Harley management who gave this order, because the companies’ management structures were so intertwined that employees could not always tell which company their supervisors worked for.
• The court construes this ambiguity against both companies, meaning both Harley and Syncreon bear responsibility for the cover-up regardless of which individual gave the order.

• This proves deliberate destruction of physical evidence of a racial death threat, followed by an active lie to an employee who asked about the investigation. The noose was not given to forensics. It was cut up and discarded.
• The court uses this sequence specifically to support the aiding-and-abetting claim: that management did not merely fail to act but took affirmative steps to cover up racist harassment, which constitutes “substantial encouragement or assistance” in the creation of a hostile work environment.

• Under Missouri law, a hostile work environment claim requires meeting both a subjective and an objective standard. The court confirms the employees’ petition satisfied both: they personally experienced the environment as psychologically harmful, and any reasonable person in their position would have found it objectively hostile and abusive.
• This is important because Harley and Syncreon argued the employees had not personally witnessed each specific incident. The court rejected this, ruling that symbols like nooses, hanging effigies, and death-threat graffiti “by their very nature, targeted and preyed on all black employees in the Plant.”

“By pleading that either Syncreon or Harley management attempted to destroy evidence of racial harassment, Appellants pleaded that Syncreon, Harley, or both substantially encouraged or assisted the discriminatory conduct that created and fostered a hostile work environment.”
— Missouri Supreme Court, SC100116 (Jan. 30, 2024)

Who Was Responsible and How

Missouri’s Supreme Court found the corporate structure itself enabled the harm. Here is how liability flows between the entities named in the case.

What Was Claimed vs. What Was Documented

Harley and Syncreon presented a set of public and legal positions about what happened inside their plant. The Missouri Supreme Court’s factual record tells a different story.

Societal Impact Mapping

Public Health

The psychological and physical consequences of sustained racial harassment in a workplace are documented and severe. What these employees experienced is not abstract stress: it is trauma with measurable health outcomes.

• The Missouri Supreme Court’s record confirms the harassment “adversely affected” employees’ “physiological well-being,” a legal finding that maps directly to documented research linking workplace racial harassment to anxiety disorders, depression, hypertension, and post-traumatic stress responses.
• Employees were forced to work in a state of sustained threat and hypervigilance. Seeing a noose or a death-threat written in your name on the bathroom wall and then being required to return to your workstation does not stop affecting you when your shift ends. The court specifically found the harassment “unreasonably interfered with work performance,” meaning the harm was visible and documented even in productivity terms.
• The destruction of employee-gathered evidence eliminated a critical coping and safety mechanism. When workers photograph evidence of harm, they are exercising agency. Having that agency stripped by management compounds the psychological injury by demonstrating that the institution that controls your livelihood will not allow you to protect yourself.
• The Black female employee whose assault complaint was thrown in a trash can in front of her was denied both formal protection and recognition that the harm occurred. Research on institutional betrayal consistently finds that this secondary harm, the failure of the institution to respond, frequently causes greater long-term psychological damage than the original incident.

Economic Inequality

The economic dimensions of this case are not incidental. The racial structure of the plant’s workforce was itself an economic arrangement, and the harassment functioned to enforce that arrangement.

• Ninety percent of Syncreon’s workforce was Black. Contract workers employed through staffing agencies consistently earn less, receive fewer benefits, and have less job security than direct employees. At the Kansas City plant, the direct Harley employees, who were majority white, and the Syncreon contract workers, who were overwhelmingly Black, were performing work in the same building under the same roof with vastly different employment protections.
• The physical line that Black workers could not cross was not only symbolic. It reinforced a literal economic and power boundary inside the plant: white Harley direct employees had full access to the facility while Black Syncreon contract workers were spatially contained and restricted.
• The man Harley fired for discriminating against Black employees was brought back by Syncreon to supervise a predominantly Black workforce. This decision subjected those workers to known discriminatory supervision, placing them in an economically coercive position: accept discriminatory treatment from a supervisor both companies knew was a discriminator, or risk your job.
• Harley closed the Kansas City plant on May 24, 2019, eight days after the employees filed their discrimination charge. The plant’s closure eliminated the entire workforce. While the source document does not establish a causal connection between the charge and the closure, the timing is documented and on the record.
• Black workers pursuing legal redress under the Missouri Human Rights Act face a system that allowed a lower court to dismiss their claims entirely, requiring a trip to the state’s highest court just to get a hearing on the merits. The cost of that litigation, in time, money, and psychological endurance, falls entirely on people who had already survived two years of documented racial terror at work.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

No financial penalties are specified in the source document, as the case was at the dismissal stage and has been remanded for trial. The metric below reflects the scale of what the companies apparently decided was acceptable to risk.

What Now?

The Missouri Supreme Court reversed the dismissal. The case goes back to trial court. Here is who to watch, who to contact, and what to do.

Who to Watch

The source document does not name Harley-Davidson’s current board members or executive officers. Contact and accountability targets are listed by role.

• Harley-Davidson Motor Company Operations, Inc.: The primary defendant. The plant is closed, but the company continues to operate nationally. Its current executive leadership and board of directors are publicly listed on harley-davidson.com and SEC filings.
• syncreon.US: The staffing contractor named as co-defendant. Staffing agency accountability is chronically under-enforced. Syncreon’s practices at this facility are now part of a public court record.
• The Platte County Circuit Court: Where this case now proceeds on remand. Court proceedings are public record. Docket filings can be tracked through Missouri’s CaseNet public case management system under Case No. SC100116 and its circuit court origin.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies

• EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission): Federal counterpart to Missouri’s Commission on Human Rights. Can investigate Title VII violations independently of state proceedings. File at eeoc.gov.
• Missouri Commission on Human Rights: The state agency where these employees originally filed their charges. Issued the right-to-sue notices that enabled this case. Contact at labor.mo.gov/mohumanrights.
• OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration): Workplace violence and harassment fall within OSHA’s general duty clause. The assault on the Black female employee in November 2018, followed by the destruction of her complaint, may constitute an OSHA reporting violation. File at osha.gov.
• DOJ Civil Rights Division: Federal civil rights enforcement. The pattern of conduct at this plant, including the physical segregation of workers and the systematic destruction of evidence, may fall within federal civil rights jurisdiction under 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 2000e. Contact at justice.gov/crt.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): Workers who were told to delete evidence of their own harassment may have had their Section 7 concerted activity rights violated. The NLRB protects workers’ rights to collectively document and address workplace conditions. File at nlrb.gov.

Mutual Aid and Grassroots Action

• If you work in a manufacturing facility with a racially tiered contractor/direct-employee structure, document everything. Photograph incidents before reporting them internally. Do not let anyone tell you to delete evidence. If an employer asks you to delete documentation of workplace harassment, that is itself a reportable act.
• Connect with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP, both of which have litigated in Missouri courts under the MHRA. They provide legal resources, know-your-rights workshops, and can connect workers with civil rights attorneys who take cases on contingency.
• If you are a Black worker at any Harley-Davidson facility or at any company that uses Syncreon or similar staffing contractors, you have the right under the MHRA and Title VII to file a charge with the EEOC or the Missouri Commission on Human Rights without involving your employer first. You do not need a lawyer to file the initial charge.
• Share this case publicly and specifically. The Missouri Supreme Court’s opinion in Matthews v. Harley-Davidson, SC100116, is public record. Cite it by name. Corporate accountability depends on sunlight: the more people know the documented factual record, the harder it becomes to quietly settle and move on.
• Support the 25 workers by following coverage of the remanded proceedings. The case is now headed to trial-level proceedings in Platte County. Verdicts in hostile work environment cases set precedent that protects future workers. This case, if it reaches a verdict, matters beyond Kansas City.