Valoria Harris says a co-worker left this photoshop in her cubicle as retaliation. (Courtesy of Michael Fuller)

Valoria Harris’ job was hard enough. She was a diffusion specialist at Intel’s campus in Hillsboro, which involved cleaning dangerous equipment: “dishwashers of acid,” Harris calls them, that scrub the silicon wafers that the company turns into computer chips.

Then came the racist jokes, Harris alleges, and the photo of a Nazi that someone hung up in her cubicle last August—digitally altered with Gov. Kate Brown’s face.

Harris knew who did it, she says in a lawsuit filed today. Her co-worker flouted the statewide mask mandate. Harris had been complaining about it, and the co-worker retaliated, she alleges.

All of this is laid out in a lawsuit filed July 13 in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Harris is suing her co-worker, boss, and Avantor, the Intel contractor she worked for, for subjecting her to a “racially hostile work environment” and retaliating against her when she reported it.

Avantor did not respond to a request for comment.

According to the complaint, it was a running gag among co-workers that there could only be one Black Avantor employee on Intel’s campus at a time. After Harris was hired, there were two. Harris says her boss and her co-worker openly joked, “It’s time to hang his ass up,” referring to the other Black employee.

In the lawsuit, Harris says she left the job after her paperwork requesting medical leave was mysteriously delayed. “I didn’t feel safe,” she tells WW.

Neither Avantor nor Intel has taken any responsibility for the Nazi imagery or the jokes, Harris says in the lawsuit, and her co-worker remained on campus. He was a member of the electrical union, and Avantor didn’t want trouble, according to the legal complaint.

Leaving her job was hard for Harris, a 31-year-old Navy veteran, who is raising a son alone and was unemployed for months. She drained the savings that she’d planned on using as a down payment on a home, she tells WW.

Her attorney, Michael Fuller, is demanding $245,000 in damages on her behalf. Fuller reached out to Intel, he said, but was told it was Avantor’s problem, not theirs.

An attorney for Intel declined to comment.

Avantor is a Fortune 500 company based in Pennsylvania. In March 2021, Intel awarded it a “Supplier Achievement Award” for its “COVID-19 response.”

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