(Reuters) – A lawsuit filed on Friday accuses Google of systemic racial bias against Black employees, saying the search engine firm steers them to lower-level jobs, pays them much less and denies them alternatives to advance as a result of of their race.
According to a grievance in search of class-action standing, Google maintains a “racially biased company tradition” that favors white males, the place Black folks comprise solely 4.4% of employees and about 3% of management and its know-how workforce.
The plaintiff, April Curley, additionally stated the Alphabet Inc unit subjected Blacks to a hostile work setting, together with by typically requiring they present identification or be questioned by safety at its Mountain View, California campus.
Google didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
The grievance was filed in the federal courtroom in San Jose, California.
It got here after that state’s civil rights regulator, the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, started investigating Google’s therapy of Black feminine employees and attainable discrimination in their office.
Curley stated Google employed her in 2014 to design an outreach program to traditionally Black faculties.
She stated her hiring proved to be a “advertising ploy,” as supervisors started denigrating her work, stereotyping her as an “indignant” Black girl and passing her over for promotions.
Curley stated Google fired her in September 2020 after she and her colleagues started engaged on an inventory of desired reforms.
“While Google claims that they had been seeking to improve range, they had been really undervaluing, underpaying and mistreating their Black employees,” Curley’s lawyer Ben Crump stated in an announcement.
Crump is a civil rights lawyer who additionally represented the household of George Floyd after he was killed in May 2020 by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
Curley’s lawsuit seeks to recoup compensatory and punitive damages and misplaced compensation for present and former Black employees at Google, and to revive them to their acceptable positions and seniority.
The case is Curley v Google LLC, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 22-01735.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
