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0 pointsdionidium1y ago0 comments

> Got any evidence for that? Is Google in the habit of paying out giant HR-related settlements for something other than protecting good ol' boys like Andy Rubin?

The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.

Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.

So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.

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rchaud1y ago

That is not evidence of a shakedown by a corporate law firm, which is the original allegation.

Google, Apple and others have colluded to not poach employees from each other, distorting a free labor market, and settled that for $400m.[0]

[0]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

It's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that individual managers at Google had discriminatory promotion practices. Google picks up the legal tab for their alleged malfeasance, because they empower managers to make those decisions.

If it is so easy to squeeze some cash out of a major company, I'd imagine Google, Apple and many others in California would be cutting checks left and right to dodge lawsuits alleging violations of the state's Equal Pay Act, which saw its last major update in 2018, enacted into law in Jan 2019.[1]

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm

fallingknife1y ago

> they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.

If anything shows that our liability laws and adjudication process is written by lawyers for lawyers it's rules like this.

rachofsunshine1y ago

Also NAL but I don't think you're correct about this.

First: the standard isn't relevant to a nuisance suit, since by definition you don't expect to win a nuisance suit anyway.

But setting that aside, disparate impact requires a significant difference in outcome and can be defended against by showing that the standards are relevant to job performance ("business necessity"). That's true for both the federal Civil Rights Act and the California Equal Pay Act (which is what this suit was brought under). So a "single variable analysis" isn't the end of the story, and employers can (and often do) provide statistical arguments that their policies satisfy business necessity.

I'd suggest looking up the case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that established the disparate impact standard in the first place. TLDR, a company that had explicitly discriminatory Jim Crow-era policies banning black employees from certain departments adopted new requirements on the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect. Those requirements hadn't been in place before, Duke Power could not show any actual connection with job performance, and white employees were two to ten times more likely to satisfy them. A unanimous court (which, as a fun trivia fact, included an open former member of the Klan!) said nope, can't do that.

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