How did the Google employee class action for wage discrimination end?
About 15,500 female employees will be compensated by Google for pay discrimination. The complaint, the company's response and the other big techs that have to contend with the same accusations
Google will pay $ 118 million for pay discrimination to approximately 15,500 female employees. The class action was filed in 2017.
THE ACCUSATION
The lawsuit, initiated by four former Google employees who have worked in Mountain View since September 2013, was filed in a San Francisco court in 2017 and gained class action status last year. A class action such as this allows plaintiffs to pool resources and negotiate a much larger compensation.
According to employees, the New York Times reports, the giant paid them $ 17,000 a year less than men employed in equivalent positions, thus violating California's Equal Pay Act.
Not only that, the company is also accused of denying promotions to women and putting over-skilled professionals into lower-paying roles.
THE AGREEMENT
Google, according to the text of the agreement made public by the lawyers, "denies all the accusations contained in the complaint and claims that [the group, ed .] Has always fully respected all applicable laws, rules and regulations".
However, the document continues, the two parties have decided to negotiate an agreement to "avoid the costs of the proceedings, while guaranteeing compensation for the applicants".
Google told NYT that it had analyzed pay equity for the past nine years and raised pay when it was justified to do so.
The compromise calls for Google to pay $ 118 million to 15,500 female employees in 236 different jobs as of September 14, 2013.
But in addition to financial compensation, the company led by Sundar Pichai, as ordered by the court, will have to entrust independent experts, for the next three years, with the evaluation of its hiring practices and studies on pay equity.
The agreement, to be effective, must now be ratified by another judge, after the next hearing scheduled for June 21st.
OLD ACCUSATIONS AND ACCUSATIONS IN PROGRESS
Google's treatment of workers has been scrutinized several times, writes The Verge . Last year, Google agreed to pay $ 2.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that the company underpaid female engineers and ignored Asian candidates .
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing is also investigating the company for allegations of potential harassment and discrimination against black employees .
MICROSOFT, TWITTER AND ORACLE
Other big techs have also received similar charges for wage discrimination. There have been collective actions, unsuccessful, against Microsoft and Twitter.
Oracle is now facing the same situation but, according to Bloomberg Law , the group of women suing the company "will likely lose class action status" after a judge on Friday said that a group of 3,000 employees and 125 different job classifications would be "unmanageable to proceed with the process".
In 2020, the article recalls, the three women in charge of the case against Oracle "reached a milestone, becoming the first to obtain class action status in a case of discrimination against a large technology company".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/come-finita-la-class-action-delle-dipendenti-google-per-discriminazione-salariale/ on Mon, 13 Jun 2022 09:03:10 +0000.