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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 23 2019, @03:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the wasting-experience dept.

Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser

Google pays $11 million to settle 227 age discrimination claims

Google will pay $11 million to settle the claims of 227 people who say they were unfairly denied jobs because of their age, according to Friday court filings. The settlement must still be approved by the judge in the case.

The original lead plaintiff in the case, first filed in 2015, was a 60-something man named Robert Heath who says he was deemed a "great candidate" by a Google recruiter. The lawsuit said that in 2013, the median age of Google employees was 29, whereas the typical computer programmer in the US is over 40, according to several different measures.

During the interview process, Heath received a technical phone interview with a Google engineer. Heath alleged that the engineer had a heavy accent, a problem made worse by the engineer's insistence on using a speakerphone. When Heath was working through a technical problem, he asked if he could share his code using a Google Doc. The interviewer refused, Heath alleged. Instead, Heath had to read code snippets over the phone—an inherently error-prone process. Heath argued that the interview process "reflected a complete disregard for older workers who are undeniably more susceptible to hearing loss."

[... Cheryl Fillekes] says she interviewed for engineering jobs at Google four times but was never offered a position. During one interview process, Fillekes says, a recruiter requested that she submit an updated résumé that showed her graduation dates for college and graduate degrees. When Fillekes asked why this was required, she says the recruiter responded that it was "so the interviewers can see how old you are."

Of the $11 million payout in the settlement, $2.75 million will go to lawyers representing the class, Bloomberg reports. Fillekes will get an extra $10,000 as the lead plaintiff. The remaining cash works out to around $35,000 per plaintiff.


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday July 24 2019, @03:20AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday July 24 2019, @03:20AM (#870579) Journal

    That's true in some places, but not likely here. The year before I started the program, I walked into a public school with no masters at all, not even a degree in math (though I had one in a math-heavy field), and I had a job within two hours.

    I was living in Texas at the time. On the first day of school, I heard on the radio that the state had 36,000 teaching vacancies still open that year. No, that's not a typo. It sticks in my head because it was so crazy. And if you need proof, I remember seeing an article from that time that said there were 40,000 statewide... It was crazy. The state started the kind of alternative certification program I was in to fast-track teachers because of the employment crisis.

    In the city region I lived in, 1800 classrooms opened on the first day of school with no permanent teacher. That's the situation these guys were in... A market where an administrator would apparently prefer to wait until the fall term started and have a vacancy (while hoping a younger and more credentialed teacher would come along) rather than hire one of these older guys who was interested in teaching.

    If you live in the Northeast or Northwest where teachers are better paid and tend to stay longer, they also often ask for more credentials. In many places in the U.S. South they are happy to have a warm body in the classroom. I had a significant math background, but the teacher my first school hired to fill another math vacancy had a psych degree and to my eye whenever I walked by her room never appeared to teach her students anything, let alone math.

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