Oakland Employment Law Blog

California residents who are old enough to suffer from age discrimination in the workplace should be aware of POWADA, the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act. This is a proposed law designed to make proving age discrimination in court much easier. One study by the Urban Institute found that 56% of older workers are forced out of their jobs before they can retire. Only one in 10 of those workers will make as much money at their new place of employment.

The U.S. Supreme Court sided with employers in 2009 by making it much more difficult for victims of discrimination to prove they were wrongfully demoted or terminated. Aged workers are still able to sue their employers for workplace discrimination; however, the Supreme Court's decision requires that plaintiffs prove that age was the sole factor in their termination or demotion. An employer could simply argue that the plaintiff would have been fired even if they were younger. The burden of proof currently lies solely on the plaintiff and creates a serious hardship since proving age as a sole factor is no easy feat.

Many employees in California and across the country continue to face serious problems with sexual harassment on the job. Unwanted sexual advances and other types of inappropriate behavior continue to rise, despite the emergence of the #MeToo movement and widespread media attention on the problem. Indeed, since allegations of sexual harassment and abuse against high-profile Hollywood executives hit major news, the number of federal complaints about sexual harassment on the job has escalated significantly.

In the 2018 fiscal year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 7,609 complaints about sexual harassment in the workplace, an increase of 13.6% over the prior year. At the same time, general reports of workplace discrimination and harassment of all types declined. This means that sexual harassment complaints formed a greater proportion of all federal filings. During the year, workers filed 76,418 complaints of workplace harassment for various protected reasons, making a nearly 10% drop. Surveys also show that more instances of sexual harassment and assault are being reported through internal company procedures as well. Still, EEOC officials said that only around one-fifth of all workers who experience sexual harassment on the job actually file a report. In most cases, people must file an EEOC claim before proceeding to a federal lawsuit for workplace discrimination.

Women workers at large and small tech companies in California and across the country continue to face serious concerns about pay discrimination. According to research, over 50 percent of women who work in the industry are paid less on average than their male co-workers. One recruitment firm reported that women may be offered lower salaries than men at 60 percent of the jobs on offer in the industry. The same survey of 2,600 tech workers reported pay differentials at 63 percent of jobs one year earlier.

After women learn that they are being paid less than male co-workers, the differences may be substantial. In 16 percent of cases, the salary differential was $20,000 or more. The pay gap became even more significant when race was taken into account as well. While there is an average pay gap of 3 percent between men and women, Hispanic women receive 9 percent less than white men at these companies. Black women receive 11 percent less than white men at the same firms. LGBT women also experienced elevated pay discrimination with an 8 percent pay gap.

A California tech company is facing a lawsuit from the U.S. Department of Labor. According to the complaint, discrimination caused black, Asian and female employees at Oracle to lose $400 million in wages over four years. The federal department began investigating the company in 2014 and initially filed its claim in 2017. It says that the software company used two primary mechanisms that enforced discriminatory practices in the workplace. In the first place, it based the pay of workers newly hired on their previous salaries rather than market rates, skills or achievement. This then limited their ability to increase their salaries throughout their careers.

In addition, the Department of Labor accused Oracle of workplace discrimination in its hiring practices from colleges and universities. The federal lawsuit said that of 500 people hired over a three-year period from the recent graduate school, 90 percent were Asian, despite the fact that the hiring pool was only 65 percent Asian. In addition, Oracle's preference was targeted to Asian visa holders, whose authorization to work was dependent on Oracle, rather than Asian Americans. Because these workers had to work for Oracle to remain in the U.S., their salaries and those of other workers could be suppressed.