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Home Depot whistleblower sues for defamation and retaliation



James Girsch, when still employed at Home Depot. Girsch was one of an undetermined number of whistleblowers that helped the EPA determine that Home Depot was dumping hazardous materials into area landfills.

James Girsch, 65, a former employee of the Home Depot in Escondido, whose Georgia parent company in March 2018 was assessed a $27.8 million fine for illegal hazardous waste dumping, is suing the company, claiming he was punished for being a whistleblower on Home Depot’s longtime alleged illegal activities.  Activities he claims Home Depot continues, despite it being put on a five year consent decree by the courts not to do it again. 

As an informant, Girsch claims he was “singled out by Home Depot with acts of oppression, fraud, malice, defamation and criminal activity in an attempt to silence his voice.” 

Girsch, an Escondido resident, first filed a lawsuit on November 29 alleging violation of whistleblower laws and claiming retaliation from the company in violation of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) and against several of his supervisors at Home Depot for illegal retaliation. His attorneys may add wrongful termination to the five counts of violation of whistleblower OSHA and FEMA laws. He is demanding a jury trial and punitive damages, to be determined.

Home Depot was served on December 4, and, according to Girsch, hasn’t yet answered the suit.

 “They did their best to drive me out, but that wasn’t successful; so, on the 21st   [of December] they terminated me. Merry Christmas!” said Girsch this week when he visited The Times-Advocate offices. “They said it was a policy violation.” Girsch believes it is the culmination of a long list of retaliatory actions supervisors took against him after he began reporting Home Depot for violations that included dumping hazardous materials in the area’s landfills.

On March 2018 San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and eight other prosecutor’s offices throughout the state, announced that an Alameda County Superior Court Judge had ordered Georgia-based Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. to pay $27.84 million to resolve allegations that it unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste, and discarded records without rendering private customer information unreadable.

The judgment resulted from a civil action filed on February 15, in Alameda County and led by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, and other prosecutors, who alleged that more than 300 Home Depot stores and distribution centers in California were “routinely and systematically sending hazardous waste to local landfills that were not permitted to receive those wastes, and were tossing documents containing sensitive customer information into store trash bins, potentially exposing the information to identity thieves.” 

Girsch says he was one of the informants in the case of hazardous materials disposal. He doesn’t know how many others there were. “A few people came forward, and I was one that was in 2013 that became transparent,” he said. “I had our store investigated for things I was seeing and the management falsified the conclusions that there wasn’t any illegal activity going on. They said that for two or three years.”

Girsch went to work for Home Depot in 2005 as a sales associate. In 2008, he became a department supervisor in Ontario. In 2011, when he moved to Escondido, he went to work at the 1475 E. Valley Parkway store. In 2014 he became supervisor of the paint department, a $5 million a year business within the store.

According to his lawsuit: “Plaintiff observed that Defendant would regularly dispose of its hazardous materials (“hazmat”), including paint, lubricants, solvents, electronic parts, flammable substances, and other chemical waste, by dumping them into public dumpsters headed to public landfills, instead of being properly processed for hazardous waste disposal. Plaintiff also noticed that Home Depot would collect foreign waste, including criminal drug lab residue, from outside the perimeter of its store building and dispose of them with the store’s garbage.”

“My two concerns is that they were dumping hazardous materials in the landfill, and Home Depot was cleaning up criminal drug lab dumps in the perimeter, without consulting with any other authority,” said Girsch. “They brought hazmat materials into the store, put it in plastic bags and dumped it into the trash compactor that was going to the public landfills.” He saw this himself many times.  “They denied it was happening, over four years—and that’s when I confronted them and had our store inspected by the EPA. They continued to deny that it was taking place.”

About December 2014 Girsch made a complaint under the California Health and Safety Code, Chapter 6.95, Section 25501, to the local EPA office, asking for an investigation of the store.

Around January 2015, Girsch was accused of a safety violation at work for using a 9-foot ladder to move stock, including paint buckets, from Home Depot’s 8-foot-tall store shelves. “This method of moving merchandise was frequently done by employees of Home Depot, often at the direction and under the supervision of management at Home Depot,” reads the lawsuit,” says the suit. “Plaintiff was unaware of anyone —including himself—ever being disciplined for moving stock using the ladders; thus, he believed he was targeted for discipline as a result of his safety-related complaints to the EPA.”

That same month, two managers pulled him aside and said he was “spreading false information” regarding illegal dumping of hazmat waste. Both denied any illegal activity and threatened to fire Girsch. 

Meanwhile a former employee sued Home Depot for age-discrimination. Girsch, who was 61, felt he was also the victim of age discrimination and “believed that he was repeatedly denied promotions and targeted for discipline in ways that were not experienced by younger employees of Home Depot in their 20s and 30s.”  He complained to the Department of Fair Employment and Housing in April 2015 and several months later signed a declaration in support of the former employee’s age-discrimination lawsuit

November 2015 Girsch was put on final notice and threatened with termination for allegedly “hiding hazmat,” with management citing a six- week-old note regarding an empty can of paint found in a store cabinet. Girsch believes he was falsely documented in retaliation for his complaints.

When he began finding and reporting hazmat violations, Girsch was demoted to the tool rental department. Tool rental was considered undesirable for many reasons, one being it had even more hazmat violations that had to be cleaned up after—which Girsch also began to report on, he says. 

In 2017 the Escondido store brought in a new general manager (named in the suit as  John Gonzales), who, “regularly made verbally-abusive comments, used profanity, and used sexually-explicit language and gestures. Under Mr. Gonzales’s leadership, the majority of the store’s managers began to also use similar language and engage in similarly offensive conduct. Many of these same managers also began to make negative comments to other employees about Plaintiff’s work in the paint department, including failure to maintain the appearance of merchandise in his department.”

Normally, says Girsch, Home Depot has a zero-tolerance profanity policy. Gonzales, who was brought into stores to “clean up ones not doing well” was the exception. Girsch claims Gonzales, who is still manager, changed the whole atmosphere. 

In 2018 San Diego DA Stephan announced the $27.8 million fine. “This settlement marks a victory for both environmental and consumer protection throughout California.” She added, “Our Environmental Unit continues to work with our colleagues across the state to hold corporations accountable when they break the law and endanger our precious resources by illegally disposing of hazardous waste. We also want to make sure that consumers’ privacy and security is maintained and protected.”

Stephan added: “From 2013 to 2015, inspectors from the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office Environmental Protection Division partnered with other district attorney office investigators and environmental regulators statewide, to conduct a series of waste inspections of dumpsters belonging to Home Depot stores. A total of 45 trash compactors belonging to 31 Home Depot stores were inspected, and the inspections revealed that all 45 compactors contained hazardous waste . . .”

Girsch has networked with Whistleblowers of America and the National Whistleblowers Center in Washington D.C. “I have their endorsement,” he says. He hopes a congressional committee will invite him to testify.  “I know other companies do what Home Depot did. The issue is, do they get caught? Home Depot would continue to do it if they hadn’t been caught. All the locations in San Diego county were investigated and all of them failed the test. They found hazmat materials in every container. I believe it’s a companywide problem. I think they will find hazmat materials in every store that is being deposited in all of the landfills.”

After Home Depot was assessed the nearly $28 million fine, Girsch claims he was present when employees were told a completely different story than the truth. 

“When those fines rolled out, managers came out to do special training. This fine was issued as a settlement and they were put on a five year consent decree. Managers told the employees that the state was getting into the bank account and charging them,” said Girsch. “They didn’t say they were being fined for their illegal activity. They blamed the state for assessing them a fine, without an acknowledgement of the purpose of the fine.”

Did the employees believe this story?  “Home Depot employees and managers tend not to be independent thinkers. They fall in line,” he said. “I came behind the managers and told them the truth, that the fines were not because California was trying to get into the company’s checkbook but because of their illegal activities.”

His motive, he says, is “Protecting the American public. The consumer is not privy to these things. I’m also working to advocate for the 400,000 employees in Home Depot that have been exposed to their criminal activity.”

He added, “The whistleblower function is to protect the public’s interest. They have chosen to retaliate against the whistleblower. Instead of working cooperatively with the informants, they work against them.”

When Girsch sued Home Depot it was probably the first time a current employee had sued although former employees had. “If they were going to take me out, I wanted them to terminate me involuntarily. They demoted and slandered me to try to force me out, but I wasn’t going to let that happen,” he said. 

“Their efforts to silence me I can’t allow to happen. And so, the journey begins.”  

He asserts Home Depot is still violating laws. “They are still cleaning up the chemical dumps in front of their buildings without cooperation with the police or anyone else,” he said. “The EPA investigated that and said they couldn’t do anything until someone gets hurt. I can’t wait for someone to get hurt. I’m trying to be proactive.” 

The $27.8 million fine won’t make Home Depot change its corporate culture, claims Girsch. “That’s one day of profits,” he said. “They learned absolutely nothing. They knew about their activities and they did nothing.”

A copy of Girsch’s lawsuit is available upon request or by accessing the San Diego Superior Court website under case number 37-2015-00060619-CU-OE-NC , Judge Timothy M. Casserly presiding. 

The Times-Advocate requested a comment from the Home Depot HQ in Georgia but at press time had not received one. If they do reply we will append it to our web version of this story.

13 responses to “Home Depot whistleblower sues for defamation and retaliation”

  1. Eric Barnes says:

    I used to work at this Home Depot and worked in paint with James as my supervisor. What he says is true, whilst there were specified waste barrels to put hazard waste in, when they became full, the overflow was bagged and put into the trash compactor, often encouraged by managers as a way to just get it out of the store.

  2. Fritz Stumpges says:

    I remember James in the rental department there and rented tools a couple of times from him . His rental department looked as good as it ever did as I remember it. He was always very helpful, professional, and best of all happy and friendly. I enjoy many of the sales associates at this store and fine them similarly helpful. It is too bad that these people get punished for poor company policy decisions.

  3. To whom it may concern I too used to work at E Valley home depot store .Everything James says is true. The only important thing to the management team at that store was the bottom line! Home depot associates be dammed and were used as garbage just like the garbage HD threw down the dumpsters. I know James personally he a wonderful man ,a man of high character and integrity ,a caring person who would do anything for his fellow human being.Go James go! keep helping people an the environment!

  4. I worked on the freight team at store 0456 under the supervision of Kieth at night. I made the mistake of telling Kieth that I was a recovering addict. After I told him that, suddenly I could do nothing right. Night after night I could see him hiding on the next aisle watching me stock merchandise and without fail he would always find something to complain about and it was then when he would get red in the face and start yelling at me. One night after i put an empty box on the floor near the compactor he once again got upset about what I had done and I told him that I didn’t appreciate being talked to like I was two years old that I was an adult and expected him to treat me as such and that his instructions were dictatorial at best
    Then I informed him that he had created a very hostile work environment and that he had made me afraid to be there for great fear of losing my lively hood that I worked very hard to get. He replied that if I didn’t like being treated like a two year old that I shouldn’t act like one! WHAT? Everyday he made things harder and harder for me. Since there wasn’t anyone else to watch him do this he thinks he got away with it as I was the only associate working freight there with exception to the lumber guy Russ.
    I still haven’t gotten paid for the last week I worked there over a month ago. I would like very much to speak with a lawyer about this matter if you know of one I would appreciate any info you could send me.

  5. I saw that very same thing being done at store 0456 and when I asked about why it was being thrown in the compactor I was told that it was company policy to “dispose of it” in order to get a credit from the manufacturers. Exactly the same items listed were being thrown in the trash here as well in accordance with company policy.

  6. Anonymous says:

    They finally fired store manager John Gonzales and it’s time to deal with Home Depot criminal activities…Go Mr Girsch and uphold what we all know as the truth. Stop Home crimes of hazmat dumping in the public landfills, retaliation, and fraud aganist the Home Depot workforce and customers.

    • Anonymous says:

      Glad they sent Escondido store manager , John Gonzales packing and out the door along with his vulgar mouth. They should have fired him a long time ago along with some of his managers for the criminal things they were doing at the store. We applaud the efforts of Mr Girsch and the integrity in brings to the situation. When is the trial date? Is there going to be anymore news coverage?. We all want to know so we can attend the public trial and read in the newspapers the details holding Home Depot accountable for their criminal activities. Now is the time to join the efforts of the San Diego district attorneys office in holding big business, HOME DEPOT, responsible for their illegal activities

  7. Anonymous says:

    They finally fired store manager John Gonzales and it’s time to deal with Home Depot criminal activities…Go Mr Girsch and uphold what we all know as the truth. Stop Home crimes of hazmat dumping in the public landfills, retaliation, and fraud aganist the Home Depot workforce and customers. CEO Craig Menear needs to be fired!

  8. Anonymous says:

    TO ALL INTERESTED PARTIES: The San Diego Superior Court has set the court date in the case of James Girsch vs The Home Depot for May 1,2020 . The multiple levels of Home Depot criminal activities will be confronted and exposed. Fraud against the Home Depot work force, the american consumer, illegal hazmat dumping, employee whistle blower retaliation and numerous other crimes. The public and media are encouraged to attend and follow this case. The American customer MUST SUPPORT THE NATIONAL BOYCOTT of Home Depot and stand against corporate crime on all levels!

  9. Jimmy T says:

    Good you’ll that’s the way to do it? Don’t give up and just keep at it? I know the feeling how a supervisor act when they have the upper hand or power to make employees feel worthless. They deserved to get fired and step on like rats….!!

  10. Anonymous says:

    Trial date against the criminal activities of Home Depot has been rescheduled for March 19,2021

  11. Anonymous says:

    Trial date moved to August 13,2021. The multiple counts of Home Depot’s criminal activities will be exposed. Go Mr. Girsch and expose the Crime Depots fraud against the American consumer, their employees, their stock holders and the public in general.

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