Call it the case that refuses to die. Or maybe Russ Vernon’s counter-jihad against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In a cover story nearly four years ago, SBN Akron brought you the saga of Russ Vernon, bowtie-bedecked owner of West Akron’s popular West Point Market, and his showdown with the EEOC. While the two parties settled the agency’s allegation about racial discrimination in the store’s hiring practices through a conciliation agreement three years ago, Vernon’s smoldering resentment has given the case a considerable afterlife.
His latest public salvo against the EEOC appeared in the August issue of Reader’s Digest, where Vernon, outfitted in his signature colorful bowtie, complains once again about the feds. In a story headlined, “Mugged by the Law,” the pugnacious purveyor of fine foods is quoted by the several-million-circulation magazine as complaining that “logic and reason don’t enter into dealing with federal regulatory agencies.”
The article is only the latest prong in an opposition campaign that has stretched on longer than the original case, which took two and a half years to settle. In a bylined essay Vernon wrote in the Wall Street Journal in March ’97, he complained about how the EEOC unleashed “its full powers and authority against our family business” in a “30-month ordeal” that cost him $67,000 in attorney’s fees. He concluded that call to arms with a plea to Congress to “rein in the agencies whose bureaucrats are conducting a reign of terror against those of us who pay their salaries.”
While Vernon’s complaints in the media have been relatively muted, his anger was more in evidence in an appearance before a traveling federal regulatory fairness board in August ’98. In a hearing in downtown Cleveland, he angrily railed about being “caught in the ultimate bureaucratic gotcha” by an arrogant agency that’s really a “government within a government.”
Vernon says he has simply turned marketing to the problem of heavy-handed government regulation. “We’ve got a [publicity] machine going here,” he boasts. It took him three letters and a year’s wait, but that eventually resulted in the Reader’s Digest article, which he says prompted as many as 150 letters. “I’ve got letters from small businessmen in New Mexico, who sound like they’re up in the mountains with their Uzis.”
The local EEOC attorney who originally handled the case, noting the Reader’s Digest article, was recently heard to complain that “he just won’t quit.” But Vernon admits that he’s finally beginning to tire of the whole thing. “Actually, I’m kind of sick of it,” he says.
John Ettorre