Read the full article by Jennifer Hijazi (Bloomberg Law)
“A multinational French company is under fire for terminating an in-house lawyer who insisted that carcinogenic ‘forever chemicals’ were possibly contaminating waters around some of the company’s U.S. factories.
Amiel Gross, a former internal attorney for Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, alleged that higher-ups fired him for escalating concerns that perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, could be poisoning the water around multiple U.S. plants, including a site in Wayne, N.J. PFOA is a member of a family of chemicals known as PFAS that have been linked to a number of health problems.
He filed the unlawful termination complaint on Tuesday with the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
According to the complaint, Gross was terminated and threatened as a result of warning the company that they were obligated to ‘rule out contamination of nearby drinking water sources and ensure other communities were not unknowingly consuming the same toxic chemical.’
Saint-Gobain, in an email to Bloomberg Law, called the lawsuit ‘baseless,’ saying that Gross was fired for violating company conduct.
‘We plan on vigorously defending this claim and are confident that there will be no finding of retaliation during Mr. Gross’s employment, or after,’ the company said in an email…”