DOL Lawsuit Says Oracle Discriminates Against Minorities And Whites

In a lawsuit filed days before the inauguration of President Trump, Oracle America, Inc. was hit with a multi-pronged discrimination lawsuit by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), the Department of Labor office that oversees federal contracts. The OFCCP alleges that Oracle engages in systematic compensation discrimination against women, Asians and African-Americans employed in certain areas, including some job titles in IT and Product Development. The complaint also alleges discrimination according to a different pattern in certain other jobs, where the company is said to favor Asians, specifically Asian Indians, at the expense of Whites, Hispanics and African-Americans. Some will surely see this as overreach, a kind of micro-enforcement by the numbers, but not commentator Elie Mystal. “At some level, we all already know exactly what kind of bias and discrimination tech companies engage in,” he writes in his On the Law article. “They hire Asians, particularly Indians, to do all the work, then pay white male executives more than anybody else. That’s the game, it’s just rare for anybody to call them on it.” In any case , the OFCCP demand is that the company provide “complete relief to the affected classes, including lost compensation, interest and all other benefits of employment resulting from Oracle’s discrimination.” The OFCCP is also seeking to cancel Oracle’s federal contracts and debar it from future contracts until it remedies the alleged problems. “Simply put,” write Epstein, Becker Green attorneys in this National Law Review article, “there are millions of dollars at stake.”