Tag: Google

EEOC Makes its Presence Known in Silicon Valley

The recent lawsuit filed by the EEOC against the city of Milpitas, California, underscores a persistent challenge in both public and private sectors: age discrimination. This case is particularly notable as it involves the city allegedly favoring a significantly younger candidate over older, more qualified candidates for a key position. The individuals overlooked were 55, 42, 56, and 58 years old, while the hired candidate was 39, highlighting a decision that seemingly disregards experience and qualifications in favor of youth.

This issue is even more pronounced in Silicon Valley, a region famed for its technological innovation but also criticized for its hiring practices, particularly the preference for hiring "digital natives" and "recent graduates." This bias towards younger workers is starkly illustrated by a class action lawsuit against Google, which claims a significant disparity in the age distribution of its workforce compared to national averages for tech professionals.

These incidents spotlight a broader cultural and systemic issue within the tech industry and beyond, where older individuals face significant barriers due to age-related biases. Addressing this requires not only legal interventions but also changes in corporate culture and hiring practices.

For organizations looking to combat age discrimination, tools like Latenode can be instrumental. Latenode's automation capabilities can assist in creating more equitable hiring processes by anonymizing candidate details that pertain to age during the review process, thus focusing evaluations strictly on qualifications and performance potential. Furthermore, Latenode can facilitate ongoing training and awareness programs for HR and managerial staff, ensuring that all levels of an organization are aligned with best practices in fair employment. This proactive approach supported by automation not only helps in adhering to legal standards but also promotes a diverse and inclusive workplace culture. Moreover, integrating such practices through apps developed for seamless functionality with Latenode can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of these initiatives.

 Silicon Valley has been a virtual apartheid ‘state’ for younger workers for years.

The EEOC lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (EEOC v. City of Milpitas, Case No. 5:15-cv-04444) after attempts failed to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.  EEOC’s suit seeks, among other things, monetary damages for the four applicants and injunctive relief intended to prevent a recurrence of age discrimination in City of Milpitas government.

“Older workers continue to face discrimination based on age due to negative stereotypes and inaccurate assumptions about their abilities,” said EEOC San Francisco Acting Regional Attorney Jonathan Peck.  “It is important for employers to ensure that such stereotyping does not impact a person’s ability to be employed.  Employment decisions must be based on merit, not age.”

EEOC San Francisco District Director William R. Tamayo added, “Age discrimination remains a problem, making up 23 percent of all EEOC charges filed in the United States last year.  It is important that employers not ignore the value that older workers can bring to their workforce.”

Google Hit With Class Action Age Discrimination Lawsuit

Silicon Valley has been an unapologetic apartheid state for young workers for years but this could be about to change.

A class action age discrimination lawsuit was filed against Google, Inc. on April 22 by software engineer Robert Heath who was interviewed but not hired for a position at Google in 2011 when he was 60-years-of-age. The lawsuit alleges Google has demonstrated a pattern and practice of violating the Age Discrimination in Employment and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

According to the lawsuit, Google’s workforce is “grossly disproportionate” with respect to age. The lawsuit asserts the median age of the 28,000 employees who worked for Google in 2013 was 29.  Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor reports the median age for computer programmers in the United States is 42.8 and the median age for software developers is 40.6. According to the lawsuit, Google had 53,000 employees in 2014 and revenues of approximately $66 billion.

Google’s position with respect to age discrimination is completely inexplicable. The company last year made a public commitment to increase race and gender diversity in its workforce, and released workforce statistics relating to those characteristics. But Google was completely silent with respect to  age and did not release age-related statistics. It was as if Google’s position was that age is not a factor in workforce diversity.

Its not like Google can claim ignorance of age discrimination laws.  The California Supreme Court in 2010 reinstated an age discrimination lawsuit filed by former Google executive Brian Reid  finding that Reid had presented sufficient evidence of age discrimination in his firing by Google in 2002.  Among other things, Reid said Google colleagues referred to him as an “old man,” and “old guy,” and “old fuddy-duddy” and joked that his CD jewel case office placard should be an “LP” or long-playing record. Google subsequently settled the case out of court.

Heath, of Boynton Beach, FL, states that he was contacted and encouraged to apply to Google by a company recruiter who said Google was embarking on its largest recruiting/hiring campaign in its history. The recruiter said Google was looking for engineers with coding experience in the C++ and Java computer languages.  Heath holds a master certification in Java, scoring higher than 96 percent of all previous test takers for that certification, and a master certification in C ++, scoring higher than 89 percent of all previous test takers for that certification. He has more than 30 years of experience working with C++ and Java.

Heath said his initial interview was a telephone interview with an engineer who called ten minutes late and was barely fluent in English. Moreover, the engineer insisted on using used a speaker phone that did not function well.  Heath was asked to write a short program in code.  The engineer insisted that Heath read the program aloud. Even though the engineer “seemed not to understand” what Heath was reading, he refused to allow Heath to email the program to him or use Google Docs.

“[B]y conducting the interview as described above, Google intentionally did not allow Mr. Heath to communicate or demonstrate his full technical abilities, and did not have a sincere interest in hiring Mr. Heath,” the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction ordering Google to adopt a valid, non-discriminatory method for hiring employees, to post notices concerning its duty to refrain from age discrimination, and to pay Heath and members of the class damages.

The case is Robert Heath v. Google Inc., 5:15-ev-01824 (4/22/2015).  It was filed in U.S. District Court of Northern California in San Jose, California.

Google & Free Speech

Google_Mountain_View_campus_dinosaur_skeleton_'Stan'I learned something new in recent weeks.  If your blog is not being searched by Google, it tends to disappear from public view.

A defining feature of the marketplace of ideas today is that free speech is increasingly dependent upon  a handful of search engines, led by Google. And that’s kind of scary.  On May 29, 2014, I wrote an article noting that Google had omitted age from its plan to boost diversity in its workforce.  I’ve written a couple of articles about the fact that Google (like many Silicon Valley companies) appears to engage in blatant age discrimination with impunity.  On the day I wrote the article  my blog received almost a thousand impressions from Google.    This means pages from my site appeared in Google search results almost a thousand times.  A week later, my blog was receiving fewer than 100 Google impressions per day.

The chart showing the decline in Google impressions on my blog since May 29 looks like the flume at a water park when standing at the top or a graph of the economy right after the Great Recession. My Google search traffic ranged from 500 to 1,250 impressions per day for the month preceding May 29; it has been below 100 impressions ever since (with the exception of one day when there were 228 impressions).

The link in the decline in search traffic on my blog may be purely coincidental.  And I realize that Google is basically a mathematical formula, an algorithm.  However, clearly Google can be tweaked.  For example, European courts have recognized an individual’s right to be “forgotten” and require  Google to omit certain information from search engine traffic.  What if  Google was hyper-sensitive and was intentionally omitting my blog from searches?  I wondered whether I have any legal right to demand that Google play fair?

The answer appears to be no.

Continue reading “Google & Free Speech”

Google Omits Age from Diversity Goals

Something is missing from diversity statistics posted online  this week by Google – information about the age of its workforce.

Google posted statistics showing a workforce that is (surprise!) incredibly non-diverse in gender and race.  Google’s workforce is  70 percent male and 30 percent female. And Google’s workforce is 61 percent white  and 30 percent Asian. Only three percent of Google’s workforce are Hispanic, two percent are African-American and four percent are described as “two or more races.”

The numbers apparently were compiled as part of a report that major U.S. employers must file with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  The EEOC report collects information about sex and race.  Companies are not required to make the information public.

Google  chose to publicly divulge  the damning figures about its overwhelmingly white male workforce, but did not reveal the ages of its employees.  Isn’t that a statistic that Google deems important in terms of measuring a diverse workforce?  Just how  many workers at Google are over the age of 40, the age at which workers fall under the protection of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

One can only speculate why Google has ignored age in its discussion of diversity. Possibly the numbers are drastically askew and Google fears an age discrimination lawsuit.  It’s not exactly a secret that  Silicon Valley generally and Google, in particular,  celebrate a youth culture.

A few years ago, Google settled a lawsuit alleging age discrimination by Brian Reid, who was hired by Google in a senior tech role when he was age 54 .  Reid  left after two years when he was re-assigned to head up a new program with no staff that was quickly phased out..  Reid said supervisors and co-workers at Google made  derogatory comments about his age, stating that he was not a “cultural fit” for the company, that he was “an old man,” “slow,” “sluggish,” “lethargic” and “an old fuddy-duddy” who “lacked energy.” Co-workers allegedly joked that Reid’s CD (compact disc) jewel case office placard should be an “LP” (which stands for long-playing record). The lawsuit was reportedly settled after the California Court of Appeals said Reid had presented undisputed evidence supported a prima facie case of age discrimination.

According to a story in  the New Republic, age thirty is over-the-hill in Silicon Valley, where “[t]ech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old.”

The  diversity statistics provided by Google are even worse than they first appear. Of the 30 percent of Google’s workforce who are female, only about 18 percent work in professional tech jobs.  Only one percent of blacks and two percent of Hispanics who work at Google work in prize tech jobs.

Of the company’s “leadership” team, 79 percent are male and 21 percent are female;  72 percent are white; 23 percent are Asian; two percent are black; 1.5 percent are identified as “two or more races” and one percent are Hispanic.

 

 

Is Google Really America’s Best Employer?

Note: Google has settled the case out of court; Brian Reid’s lawyer declines to say for how much America’s “best employer” was forced to shell out to settle the age discrimination case.  PGB

Google was ranked number one this week in Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work for,”  and it does seem to be a great place to work  — unless you remember a time when the only “search engine” was the card catalog at your local library.

Google is battling an age discrimination lawsuit brought by a former executive, Brian Reid, who was hired by Google in 2002 as director of operations and engineering.  After two years, Reid, then 54, was fired  by Google.

Reid has a Ph.D. in computer science and is a former associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. He managed a team that built one of the first Internet search engines at AltaVista.

In the lawsuit, Reid said supervisors and co-workers at Google made numerous derogatory comments about his age, stating that he was not a “cultural fit” for the company, that he was “an old man,” “slow,” “sluggish,” “lethargic” and “an old fuddy-duddy” who “lacked energy.” Co-workers allegedly joked that Reid’s CD (compact disc) jewel case office placard should be an “LP” instead of a “CD.”

Reid also offered statistical evidence of age discrimination at Google, evidence Google demoted him to a nonviable position before terminating him, and that Google advanced changing rationales for his termination.

The trial court initially dismissed Reid’s lawsuit, after Google filed a motion for summary judgment.  But Reid appealed and the lawsuit was reinstated by the California Court of Appeals, which said undisputed evidence supported a prima facie case of age discrimination. Google appealed that decision to the California Supreme Court, which also ruled in Reid’s favor.

Google argued that the derogatory comments made by staffers about Reid should be rejected under the judicial “stray remarks doctrine,” and that slurs like “fuddy-duddy” are insufficient to show that Google’s asserted reason for firing Reid was a pretext for age discrimination.

The California Supreme Court agreed with the appeals court’s determination that the categorical exclusion of evidence by the application of the “stray remarks doctrine” was unnecessary and might lead to unfair results in Reid’s case.  The Court said the so-called “stray remarks” should be evaluated in combination with all of the evidence.  [See Reid v. Google, Inc., 50 Cal.4th 512 (2010)]

The only written performance review of Reid by Google was positive. His supervisor, Wayne Rosing,  described Reid as having “an extraordinarily broad range of knowledge concerning Operations, Engineering in general and an aptitude and orientation towards operational and IT issues.”  Reid was praised for “project[ed] confidence when dealing with fast changing situations,” and being “very intelligent,” “creative,” “a terrific problem solver.”

But Reid’s supervisor wrote that “[a]dapting to Google culture is the primary task for the first year here . . .. Right or wrong, Google is simply different: Younger contributors, inexperienced first line managers, and the super fast pace are just a few examples of the environment.” (Emphasis added.)

The review concluded that Reid “consistently [met] expectations.”

In October 2003, Reid was removed from his position as the director of operations position, and relieved of his responsibilities as director of engineering. He was replaced by two employees, who were 15 and 20 years younger, respectively.  Google asked Reid to develop  an in-house graduate degree program and an undergraduate college recruitment program.

Reid maintains that Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt assured him the graduate program was important and would last at least five years. But Reid was given no budget or staff to support it.

Google says it fired Reid on February 13, 2004 because it was eliminating graduate degree program and Reid’s job, and because of poor performance. Reid says he was given no reason for his termination other than lack of “cultural fit.” He said he was told the graduate program would continue and his termination was not performance based.

According to CNN,  Google was picked as best employer because: “Employees rave about their mission, the culture, and the famous perks of the Plex: bocce courts, a bowling alley, eyebrow shaping (for a fee) in the New York office. Then there’s the food: some 25 cafés companywide, all gratis. Wrote one Googler: “Employees are never more than 150 feet away from a well-stocked pantry.”

Among other things, Reid’s complaint includes claims for age discrimination under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) (Gov. Code, § 12900 et seq.), wrongful termination in violation of public policy; failure to prevent discrimination; and both negligent and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

*  Editorial note: Before I confer the honor of America’s best employer on Google, I’d like to see how Reid’s lawsuit turns out. We may never see that, of course, because given the direction the litigation has taken, Google may be SERIOUSLY considering an out of court settlement (if it hasn’t already). In any case, I am not inclined to think that any employer who engages in pervasive age discrimination (or any other kind of illegal discrimination) is exemplary or worthy of honor. And I predict that the young people who are so thrilled with bocce ball and free coffee today will have a sad awakening in the not too distant future. They may start hearing “stray remarks” just around the time their children start thinking about college, when a paycheck would really come in handy.