It Figures

$1.9 Million

New York-based aviation fueling company Allied Aviation Services Inc. has agreed to pay nearly $1.9 million to black and Hispanic workers at the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to settle a racial harassment lawsuit brought by employees who said they were taunted with hangman’s nooses, racist cartoons and other racial slurs. The settlement will be paid to 15 current and former employees who worked at Allied’s fueling station at DFW. The company admitted no wrongdoing, according to the Associated Press. Although the lawsuit focused on DFW workers, lawyers said they received similar complaints from Allied workers at John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia and Newark (N.J.) Liberty International airports. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission joined private attorneys in filing the suit. An EEOC attorney said while Allied was the largest settlement of a race-based case ever in the agency’s Dallas office, which covers most of Texas and southern New Mexico, racial harassment cases have doubled over the past two decades. The settlement requires Allied to conduct annual diversity training for all employees around the country for three years and to file quarterly reports with the EEOC listing any complaints of discrimination or retaliation.

$164.2 Billion

Traffic crashes cost U.S. motorists $164.2 billion a year — or about $1,051 per person — according to a recent AAA research report. That’s more than double the $67.6 billion in annual costs from congestion, or about $430 per person. The study, conducted by Maryland-based Cambridge Systematics Inc., found that the nation’s largest cities, such as New York and Los Angeles, face billions of dollars in costs each year from car accidents. In the New York metropolitan area, they cost the region $18 billion a year, or about $962 per person, while they cost Los Angeles more than $10 billion a year, or $817 per person. Residents of smaller cities faced a larger per-person burden, the study found. Crashes in the Little Rock-North Little Rock region in Arkansas cost $1.4 billion, or $2,258 per person, while car wrecks carried a price tag of $1,772 a person around Pensacola, Fla., and $1,568 a person in Columbia, S.C.

$25,000

Fine due to be paid by comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken. The former Saturday Night Live star, running for an open Minnesota Senate seat, failed to carry workers’ compensation insurance on the New York-based employees of his self-named corporation from 2002 to 2005. The state Workers’ Compensation Board says the fine hasn’t been paid despite a number of notices sent to Franken’s New York address; Franken said he never received one, but has agreed to pay the fine.