Oakland Employment Law Blog

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued a groundbreaking decision concerning complaints of discrimination against employers that used Facebook advertising to discriminate against women and older people. Multiple complaints filed by Facebook users against 66 companies prompted the commission to agree that the demographic targeting system within Facebook advertising tools enabled discrimination against job seekers in California and nationwide.

A lawyer representing plaintiffs in seven of the cases praised the decision of the EEOC because it affirmed that civil rights law applied on digital advertising platforms. The discrimination arose from employers setting parameters for job ads that only displayed the messages on Facebook to users who were men under the age of 55. Filtering out specific demographic segments represented violations of the Civil Rights Act and Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The decision from the EEOC could enable the workers who experienced discrimination to win settlements eventually.

A university study indicates that California workplaces may not have been positively impacted by the MeToo movement. The study included surveys of both men and women at the peak of the MeToo movement in 2018 and then similar surveys in 2019 once the movement had cooled. In the 2019 survey, 27% of men said they were more likely to avoid having one on one meetings with female coworkers, and 21% said they were more reluctant to bring on new female employees for positions where close interaction was required.

Additionally, 19% of the men surveyed said they were more reluctant to hire attractive women. All three of those figures had increased over the 2018 survey, where they were each around 15%. Many of the men surveyed said they had increased difficulty in identifying behavior that qualified as sexual harassment following MeToo. The study, though, by breaking down behaviors, indicated that both men and women largely agree regarding what constitutes harassing behavior.

Readers who follow California's entertainment industry could be interested to learn that a crew member on the CBS drama series "Criminal Minds" has filed a lawsuit against CBS Corp., ABC Studios, Warner Bros. and others over sexual harassment and battery claims. The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.

According to the court filing, the plaintiff, a camera operator on the series, claims that he has been subjected to a series of sexual harassment and battery incidents by his supervisor, the director of photography, since he began working on the show in 2011. He alleges that his boss inappropriately touched his body in a sexual manner fairly often for years. He also claims that his boss repeatedly screamed at him, threatened to have him fired or demoted on a regular basis and prevented him from being promoted. He further contends that other employees on the series were wrongfully fired after reporting similar incidents by the same individual.

LGBT workers in California and across the country could be seriously affected by the outcome of three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. On Oct. 8, the high court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on the cases, which concern whether workplace discrimination against LGBT employees is prohibited under federal civil rights laws. In a striking move from the business community, over 200 large corporations filed a legal brief urging the court to rule that LGBT workers are protected under existing law prohibiting sex discrimination.

The brief, being filed by five LGBT rights organizations, is signed by major corporations including Amazon, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, Nike and Walt Disney as well as two baseball teams, the San Francisco Giants and the Tampa Bay Rays. The companies say that a uniform rule against workplace discrimination best helps to ensure that their workers face equal circumstances and protections in all 50 states. While some states explicitly include gender identity and sexual orientation in their anti-discrimination laws, others do not. If there is no clear federal standard, workers in those states face a serious gap in protections.