Santa Ana, CA On May 1, the jury in Lawson v. PPG Industries, Inc. awarded Wally Lawson $20,000 in back pay and $2 million in noneconomic damages after he was fired for exposing corporate fraud at PPG Industries. His California labor lawsuit claims that he was fired after he called the company’s ethics hotline to expose a scheme to cheat the company’s customer, Lowe’s home improvement stores.
Incidentally and along the way, he was also shorted on his own overtime wages in violation of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). PPG also allegedly failed to reimburse him for business expenses, including the cost of his home internet, which he used to do his job.
A casual observer might suspect a pattern.
Lawson worked for PPG Industries as a Territory Manager (TM), merchandizing PPG Industries’ architectural paint products in Lowe’s stores in Orange County. Sometime in the early summer of 2017, Clarence Moore, the Regional Manager to whom Lawson reported, directed Lawson and other TMs in his region to “mistint” gallons of PPG Industries’ “RescueIt” product at Lowe’s stores.
Like other paints, RescueIt is shipped to Lowe’s stores in a neutral-colored base formula and then tinted to the color of the customer’s preference using a tinting machine at the store’s paint counter. Moore reportedly suggested that the mistinting be done “on the down low.” He suggested that PPG employees could oversee the store’s...
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