‘We don’t pay you to think.’ Female employee sues California prisons, alleging discrimination

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One of the few female maintenance workers at a California prison is suing the corrections department, alleging her former boss repeatedly harassed and undermined her because of her gender.

Pam Payne, 59, of Elk Grove, said in a lawsuit filed Monday that former manager Phil Albee went to great lengths to make her work life miserable, jeopardizing workers’ safety and wasting money in the process.

Concord-based attorney Jon King said he filed a digital copy of Payne’s lawsuit against the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in Sacramento County Superior Court on Monday.

Payne, who says she was passed over for a promotion and suffered emotional and psychological distress due to Albee’s treatment, is seeking money to cover lost wages and benefits along with damages for her distress. She said she also hopes the lawsuit will draw attention to how women are treated in the male-dominated working environments of the prisons.

“There are very few women in this type of work,” she said. “It needs to be talked about and people need to know what goes on in these types of things.”

Albee, who retired in December 2019, said by phone that he treated Payne the same as other employees.

“All my employees were treated equally and fair,” he said. “And when they were given direction it was clear and concise, and if they went off on some strange tangent I don’t know what to say.”

Payne started a job in 2014 as a building trades supervisor at California Health Care Facility in Stockton. She had a decade of prior experience in state maintenance work, including six years at the prison located in Tracy known as Deuel Vocational Institution.

According to the lawsuit, a few weeks after she started, she assigned her employees a simple task: number the prison’s fleet of 30 electric golf carts.

“The staff were really excited, (saying) ‘finally I can find the cart I’m looking for,’” Payne said. “He said to me, you do not make decisions without checking with me first. We don’t pay you to think.”

Albee ordered the numbers removed, according to the lawsuit. A few years later, when Payne asked a male employee to make the same suggestion, Albee said it was a “great idea,” and the numbers were put back on the carts, according to her lawsuit.

“That’s not true,” Albee said upon hearing the accusation over the phone. He declined to elaborate on Payne’s specific allegations, deferring to the corrections department to offer any details.

“CDCR is committed to having a work environment free from any form of discrimination and/or harassment and where everyone is treated with respect,” spokeswoman Dana Simas said in an email. “As this is pending litigation, we are unable to comment on specific information regarding this case.”

Tool cage built after complaint

Payne noticed that, unlike other state institutions, the Stockton prison didn’t have a specially locked cage to store tools, including dangerous items such as chainsaws, pitchforks and saws accessible to inmates.

She said she suggested building a cage for the tools, citing safety protocols in the Department Operations Manual.

“You don’t need it,” Albee told her, according to the lawsuit. “It’s just a bunch of shovels and rakes. What’s an inmate going to do, dig his way out of here?”

She eventually notified the prison’s Investigative Services Unit, and then, months later, the cage was built in one day, according to the lawsuit.

Payne was out on medical leave for long stretches of time in 2016 and 2017 after surgery for a work-related shoulder injury, she said. While she was away, Albee promised her job to his friend, she said in the lawsuit.

Start time changed at prison

When she returned to work in February 2017, Albee changed her start time to 5:30 a.m. from 7 a.m. The change prevented Payne from commuting to work with her wife, who also worked at the prison, according to the suit.

Although Payne was a supervisor, Albee ordered her to spend all of her time sorting thousands of tools in an unheated warehouse, according to the lawsuit.

When he thought the project was taking too long, he told her, “a woman doesn’t know the difference between a hammer and screwdriver,” according to the lawsuit.

The six-week project was designed to force her to quit her job or seek a transfer to another facility, according to the lawsuit.

Her lawsuit says an associate warden and the warden were notified about some of the disputes, but no one took effective action to stop the meddling.

Her lawsuit also accuses Albee of blocking a promotion for her while grooming a male candidate for the job.

She filed a complaint with the Department of Fair Housing and Employment in July 2019, according to the lawsuit.

Albee retired in December 2019, according to the lawsuit.

The Department of Fair Housing and Employment closed her case without making any findings of misconduct in 2020, and issued a right-to-sue notice, according to the suit.

This story was originally published May 11, 2021 at 6:44 AM.