A complaint filed on Friday accuses Google of racial discrimination against Black employees, alleging that the search engine business directs them to lower-level employment, pays them less, and denies them advancement prospects because of their colour.
According to a complaint seeking class-action status, Google has a “racially biassed company culture” that favours white men, with Black individuals accounting for only 4.4 per cent of employees and around 3% of leadership and technology.
April Curley, the complainant, also claimed that the Alphabet Inc business created a hostile work environment for Black employees by frequently requesting them to present identification or be questioned by security at its Mountain View, California headquarters.
Requests for a response from Google were not immediately returned.
In federal court in San Jose, California, the complaint was filed.
It came after the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the state’s civil rights regulator, began looking into Google’s treatment of Black female employees and suspected employment discrimination.
Google hired Curley in 2014 to establish an outreach programme for historically Black colleges, according to Curley.
Supervisors began disparaging her work, categorising her as an “angry” Black woman, and passed her up for promotions, she claimed, proving her hiring to be a “marketing ploy.”
Curley claimed she was fired by Google in September 2020 after she and her coworkers started working on a list of needed revisions.
“While Google professes to be working to enhance diversity, their Black employees were being undervalued, underpaid, and mistreated,” Curley’s lawyer Ben Crump said in a statement.
Crump is a civil rights attorney who also represented George Floyd’s family when he was slain by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in May 2020.
Curley’s lawsuit aims to recoup compensatory and punitive damages, as well as lost wages, for present and former Black Google employees, as well as to reinstate them to their proper positions and seniority.