Google has been hit with a lawsuit by a black employee, accusing the company of systemic racial bias. They accuse the search engine company of assigning them to lower-level jobs, unequal pay, and creating a hostile work environment.
Details inside…
Systemic racism at Google? It’s not that hard to believe.
A black employee has pulled the trigger on a lawsuit against Google, accusing the search engine company of creating a hostile work environment, assigning black employees to lower-level jobs, and denying people of color opportunities to advance their careers due to their race. Oh?
According to a complaint seeking class-action status (Curley v Google LLC, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 22-01735), Google has been accused of creating a “racially biased corporate culture” that favors white men. Not only that, black people only comprise of 4.4% of its employees and only about 3% hold leadership positions and work in their technology workforce.
April Curley - the plaintiff - isn’t playing games with Google. In the lawsuit, she said the Alphabet Inc. unit subjected black employees to a “hostile work environment.” For instance, the black employees were ALWAYS required to show identification or be questioned by security at its Mountain View, California campus.
In 2014, Google hired April to design an outreach program for historically black colleges. However, she claims the company only hired her as a “marketing ploy” because supervisors began to unfairly criticize her work, they stereotyped her as an “angry” black woman, and passed her over for promotions. She said she was fired in September 2020 after she started working on a list of reforms with some of her colleagues. The former Google employee has hired famed civil rights lawyer Ben Crump.
“While Google claims that they were looking to increase diversity, they were actually undervaluing, underpaying and mistreating their black employees,” Ben Crump said in a statement.
The former Google employee is seeking to recoup compensatory, punitive damages, and lost compensation for current and former black employees at Google. She also wants the company to restore them to their appropriate positions and seniority.
Curley’s lawsuit seeks to recoup compensatory and punitive damages and lost compensation for current and former black employees at Google, and to restore them to their appropriate positions and seniority.
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