SAN FRANCISCO -- The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced today the settlement of an employment discrimination lawsuit against Interstate Hotels, LLC, which operates the Marriott Fisherman's Wharf Hotel in San Francisco.

The suit charged that a manager at the Marriott Fisherman's Wharf used abusive language, insults and racial epithets to create a "hostile work environment" for a number of Latino workers. The settlement awards the main plaintiff, Raul Gutierrez, as well as several other workers, a total of $320,000 in damages. Gutierrez and 14 other co-workers were named in the suit as being immune to retaliation by the company, said regional EEOC attorney William R. Tamayo in an interview today.

In addition to the monetary penalty, the settlement enters Interstate hotels into a consent decree, which provides that the company will train its supervisory and management employees at the Marriott Fisherman's Wharf about national origin-based discrimination and train its human resources staff on conducting harassment investigations, according to the EEOC.

"Marriott worked with us to reach a fair resolution of the case," Tamayo said, indicating his satisfaction with the settlement.

Gutierrez initially brought the complaint against one specific manager at the hotel, who called Latino employees "monkeys," said things like "how did you get out of Mexico," and generally yelled at Latino employees more than others, Tamayo said. That manager, who started with the hotel in 2000, died in 2004, Tamayo said.

Gutierrez started with the hotel in 2001 as a banquet server and filed the charge with EEOC in 2004, after the manager had died, said EEOC attorney Jonathan T. Peck, who also worked on the case.

"The point here is that you have a manager who is charged by law to make sure harassment doesn't occur," Tamayo said, "and that person is doing the harassment."

Under the terms of the settlement, Interstate has agreed that, under the 30-month duration of the consent decree, it will report any complaints of national origin-based discrimination to the EEOC.

"Hopefully it will advise employers to take these things seriously. It's not every day that a government agency sues an employer," Tamayo said of the settlement.

Similar instances of harassment are on the rise nationally, Tamayo said. To combat that trend, he said, the EEOC has been working with Spanish-language media outlets to try to inform workers of their rights. "In the sense that more and more Latinos are in the workforce, more employers need to be aware" of national origin-based discrimination, Tamayo said.

Virginia-based Interstate Hotels, L.L.C. did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Tamayo indicated that they had been cooperative in settling the suit.