Defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman agreed to pay her former undocumented maid $5,500 Wednesday to settle a dispute that erupted during the heat of the fall campaign.Dr. Harsh may have felt he won a kind of moral victory by Diaz' refusal to meet his gaze. In Anglo-Saxon culture, the refusal to meet someone's gaze is usually taken to mean dishonesty, or bad faith. Cynical Harsh probably concluded that it was just about the money anyway (even though the amount was tiny for a billionaire), and willingly signed off.
Nicky Diaz Santillan and Gloria Allred, her famous Los Angeles attorney, said they were pleased with the agreement.
It includes a statement from Whitman that she does not feel she owed her maid any money, and it is less than the $8,000 to $10,000 in wages, mileage and penalties that Allred had pursued.
But Allred called the agreement a "victory" that "vindicates us" because the check that Diaz Santillan will get is close to the entire amount she had initially sought – about $6,000.
...Whitman did not attend the conference with officials of the state Department of Industrial Relations, but an attorney and her husband, Griffith Harsh, did attend.
..."Dr. Harsh was very concerned. He wanted to make sure that what Nicky Diaz was saying, she actually believed," Brown added.
Harsh asked the former maid, Brown said, to "look him in the eye" and say she was really owed money. He said Diaz Santillan refused.
Nevertheless, in Hispanic culture, it's usually extraordinarily bad manners to meet someone's gaze directly. Since Diaz, in particular, had her integrity in question, she would never, ever, have met Dr. Harsh's gaze.
And so, once again, we run smack into the Anglo/Latino cultural divide, where distrust breeds.
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