NY Post
Alleged subway shooter Frank James complained his career as a machinist was derailed by discrimination — but court records show he was a shoddy worker who refused to fix his own mistakes. James, 62, worked as a machinist at Curtiss-Wright, a massive defense contractor, for 17 months, suing the company for racial discrimination in Newark Federal Court after he was fired in March 1991 for insubordination. His bosses at the time said James failed to fill out inspection sheets and made parts incorrectly, then blew off directives to fix the sloppy work, decades-old court papers reveal. In some of the hundreds of videos he posted to social media, James described taking a machine shop course in the early 1980s before going to work at Curtiss-Wright, and griped he “couldn’t get any justice for what I went through.” He was disciplined eight times in his final 13 months with the company, including for excessive absenteeism, and was once suspended for three days for “failure to perform,” according to accounts from Curtiss-Wright employees filed by the company in response to James’ 1991 lawsuit. James told a supervisor at the Wayne location that he wouldn’t fill out the inspection sheets as directed “until the Union told him to do so,” said his then-supervisor, James Powell, in court papers. A year earlier, in 1990, then-shop foreman Kevin Noon found in James’ work area five parts that were defective “because of Mr. James’ own errors in machining.” “I told him that he should correct his mistakes before his shift ended and not leave this work for the next operator,” Noon recalled in the legal filing. After James ignored him, Noon’s supervisor gave James a three-day suspension, since it was the second warning “for the same violation within the past three months.” James was one of five employees fired for insubordination from 1985 through 1991, then Curtiss-Wright Human Resources exec Joseph Sangregorio said in court records, noting that the other canned workers were white or Asian and race did not factor into the decisions.
