Saravia v. County of Los Angeles
Appellant Rudy Saravia, a Latino-American born in Guatemala, emigrated to the United States as an adult. In 1995, he began working for the pest control bureau of respondent Los Angeles County's Department of Agricultural Commissioner/Weights & Measures as an intermediate clerk, the bureau's lowest ranking job classification. His duties included answering the phone, taking messages for the bureau's field inspectors, and entering phytosanitary certificates into the bureau's database. Proper recording of the certificates required accurate entry of five pieces of information: the certificate's number, its date, the country of origin, the shipper, and the inspector.
Respondent Paul Dufourd became the bureau's deputy director in 2000. After his appointment, Dufourd and appellant's then-immediate supervisor, Linda Lewandowski,[1] received complaints from bureau field inspectors that appellant took phone messages inaccurately and failed to forward them, wasting the inspector's time. Dufourd additionally discovered appellant had accumulated a months' long backlog of unentered phytosanitary certificates. To eliminate the backlog, other bureau employees, including supervisor Lewandowski, helped appellant enter the certificates.
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