Martinez Powless filed a federal civil rights discrimination complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Milwaukee District claiming that MATC violated her right to equal employment.
By H. Nelson Goodson
Hispanic News Network U.S.A.
January 6, 2025
Milwaukee, Wisconsin - On December 30, 2024, Dr. Eva Martinez Powless, the former first Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) Vice-President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion filed a civil rights discrimination complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, Milwaukee District and claimed that MATC violated her right to equal employment.
Martinez Powless is seeking reinstatment to her MATC job, punitive damages, back pay, attorney fees, compensation and costs for MATC's violations to Dr. Martinez Powless right to equal employment, and unlawful discriminatory and retaliatory employment practices against her. Also, that MATC knownly conducted the malicious discriminatory and retaliatory practices, willfully causing Martinez Powless to suffer substantial economic and non-economic damages, severe mental anguish and emotional distress.
Martinez previously filed a Charge of Discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging violations of Title VII. She received a Notice of Right to sue from the EEOC on October 7, 2024.
According to the federal complaint, Martinez Powless began to get complaints from MATC employees that they were experiencing discrimination, harassment, retaliation and were not being promoted to other positions when applying for job openings.
When she brought up the MATC employees complaints to her direct manager, Phillip King, the Executive Vice-President of Student Success at MATC, he began to excluded her from leadership team meetings and began to bully her, including the practice of micro-aggression at the workplace, micromanaging her work and treating her in "an unprofessional and inappropriate way", and denying her the same terms and conditions of employment available to employees who are not Latina or immigrants.
In an article published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday, Martinez Powless was quoted, "I am one of many victims of what I believe is a discriminatory culture that has been allowed to perpetuate at MATC but I cannot stand by and allow it to continue without demanding accountability," Martinez Powless said. "That is why I filed this case. Something must change."
"In the first five or six months when I was there, I met with over 500 employees, and there was a pattern of them expressing a culture of retaliation, a culture of fear, and also a culture of mistreatment, particularly for Black and brown employees," Martinez Powless said in a September interview with the Journal Sentinel.
Martinez Powless was terminated from her position at MATC on April 15, 2024, according to the federal complaint.
According to other MATC employees, students and a MATC Counselor during a MATC Board meeting in October 2024, they gave testimony exposing the practice of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, lack of promotions at the technical college.
• Here's the October 2024 MATC Board meeting video where Luz Sosa, Carlos Aranda, Patricia Gómez and others exposed the hostile, harassment, retaliation and discrimination practices by leadership administrators at the technical college. https://youtu.be/Lm_ImpZGXn4
• The latest video, December 2024, the MATC Board meeting and testimony given by employees and MATC Counselor Carlos Aranda https://youtu.be/ed93-NODo8M
Previous Hispanic News Network U.S.A. (HNNUSA) articles about the response by Darryll Fortune, Director of Content and Public Relations at the Milwaukee Area Technical College. HNNUSA's article links: https://tinyurl.com/3yndt9tm and https://tinyurl.com/4uf42ua4
The 15-page federal complaint filed on December 30, 2024 by Dr. Eva Martinez Powless at link: https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/MATCComplaint.pdf
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