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Four self-employed contractors who were freelancing at a technology giant have lost their jobs for using the company’s premises to hang nooses. Texas-based FMC Technologies, which makes equipment for oil and aviation firms, said on Tuesday that the four committed reprehensible acts of racial harassment. The first noose hanging at the company’s factory, involved three contractors, including one female, and occurred on a night shift almost a month ago. In what appears to be a copycat stunt, another worker, also hired on a contract basis, last week hung a noose around property at the same factory, located in Houston. All four of the workers were terminated and barred from the premises, FMC said; adding that their self-employed status offered them no protection. “Whether you are employed by another company working at our facilities, as these four were, or on the FMC payroll, there will be severe consequences for engaging in this sort of conduct,” said Peter Kinnear, the company’s chief executive. Further to sacking the workers and briefing its 19,000-strong global workforce, the Associated Press understands FMC has contacted the FBI for assistance in dealing with the case. The noose hangings are part of wider trend across the US: in Jena, Louisiana, racial tensions were sparked when a rope with a loop was dangled from a schoolyard tree. Since then nooses have showed up in a bag belonging to a black coast guard; at a Long Island police station, on a Maryland college campus, and this week, on the office door of a black professor at New York’s respected Columbia University. Like the burning cross, a noose has become a generations-old means of instilling racial fear in the US, symbolising lynchings in the Old South of ethnic minorities. Nov 2, 2007 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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