Yahoo! Inc. was accused in a lawsuit of manipulating employee performance evaluations to justify firing hundreds of workers in order to meet its financial targets.
Gregory Anderson, who was an editor for some of Yahoo's online news content, claims he and about 600 others at the company were unfairly fired in 2014 after managers retooled a numerical ranking system to downgrade their performance.
The mass terminations occurred without appropriate notice in violation of state and federal laws, according to the complaint filed Monday in federal court in San Jose, California. Anderson also accused the company of gender discrimination under the U.S. Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing internal promotions he said were limited to female candidates.
"The employees were never told their actual metric numeric ranking or how it had been determined," according to the complaint. The quarterly performance rating process "therefore permitted and encouraged discrimination based on gender and any other personal bias held by management."
California law requires that the termination of 50 or more employees within a month occur with a 60-day notice period. Anderson was told by Yahoo that he was fired while attending a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan granted with the support of the company, according to the complaint. He said he was informed the decision was effective immediately.
Earlier Coverage: Yahoo! Turnaround Plan: Proxy War and Fire Mayer?
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Marissa Mayer to Make Case That Yahoo Can Be Turned Around
Marissa Mayer is gearing up for yet another turnaround plan for Yahoo! Inc. Given the company's persistent growth slump, even a sweeping overhaul may do little to fend off activist investors threatening to wage a proxy war aimed at her removal.
Yahoo's chief executive officer, who has overseen falling sales in 7 of the past 10 quarters, promised to detail a plan to cut costs and boost growth. The effort, set to be announced with quarterly earnings Tuesday, will probably include job cuts, a person with knowledge of the matter has said.
Once a major gateway to the wealth of information, communities and entertainment on the Internet, people have in recent years ditched Yahoo in favor of Google, Facebook Inc. and other companies at the center of people's digital lives. Since her hiring in 2012, Mayer has made scant headway in efforts to restore growth at the Web pioneer. Now, she's mired in a complex project to decouple Yahoo's main business from its $25 billion stake in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Activist investors dissatisfied with progress have all but threatened a proxy war.
"She's almost out of time," said Ryan Jacob, who manages Yahoo shares as part of his Jacob Internet Fund. "At this point, it's hard to imagine a proxy fight being averted. I would welcome it, given the changes at Yahoo have just been incremental. That's what's been frustrating shareholders for years."
Yahoo to Lay Off 15%, Consider Reverse Spin-Off
Yahoo on Tuesday announced it would consider a reverse spinoff and cut about 15 percent of its workforce as part of a restructuring to boost a sluggish core business.
The tech company also posted quarterly results broadly in line with analysts' expectations. Yahoo reported adjusted fourth-quarter earnings of 13 cents per share on $1.27 billion in revenue.
Analysts expected Yahoo to report earnings of about 13 cents per share on $1.19 billion in revenue, according to a consensus estimate from Thomson Reuters. Yahoo shares fell nearly 3 percent in after-hours trading.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Saturday February 06 2016, @08:48PM
For a lawsuit like this to be successful, you have to prove intent. Hearsay isn't enough. You have to prove a manager did use a personal bias to violate specific laws. This guy would have to have a "smoking gun" e-mail or something similar that is admissible in court. We'll have to wait and see if the trial can produce substantive evidence. Remember Pao's case and how it fell apart completely after starting with a lot of accusations and fifty trillion news articles with her picture on them. (I can't decide if Pao or Mayer had more news articles with a picture in 2015.)
The part about firing a lot of people without notice probably has more merit, but I'm sure Yahoo has their legal bases covered about something like this. It seems all they've done for years is purge workers. They've been purging workers since Mayer started in 2012, and probably before then. Did no one at Yahoo think to check California law in all that time? Seems unlikely.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Saturday February 06 2016, @09:20PM
If he can show that women got an overwhelming number of promotions at the time, that would be evidence of systemic bias.
Is there any employee ranking system that isn't either overtly biased (picking muh favorites) or programmatically biased (using an arbitrary metrics formula)? Except maybe raw sales numbers?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Saturday February 06 2016, @10:20PM
Factory work is often times purely computational and relatively fair. But, most of those jobs are going to be delegated to robots as soon as they get good enough. That is the ones that haven't already been automated.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Francis on Saturday February 06 2016, @10:17PM
No you don't, there are other ways of doing it.
The matter of who got the promotions is not going to be hard to determine and if it turns out that they were going primarily to women, that's going to be sufficient to put Yahoo on the defensive here. The standards involved are fairly low for civil cases, so they just have to show that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it was discriminatory. And if most of the candidates promoted were female, then they're basically fucked. Either they were discriminating against women prior to the spate of promotions or they were discriminating against men with the promotions. I'm not even sure how a lawyer can spin it so that neither of those cases is accepted.
And if they were keeping the metrics secret, that's going to be rather problematic as well. You can fire an employee for just about any reason in much of the US, however, when you start to use secret scores and combine that with results that favor one group or another, you're taking a huge risk that you're not firing anybody in a protected class.
As far as the layoffs go, this is a pretty clear violation of the law if they were using a formula to determine who was being retained or fired. This doesn't sound like a case where there were a lot of people being fired independently of each other, so the normal rules about layoffs are almost certainly going to apply here.
IANAL, take this for what it's worth, but if the evidence that the attorney is referencing exists, then they have a pretty good shot at winning here. Anti-discrimination laws exist to protect men just as much as women. If they were just for the purposes of protecting women they wouldn't be constitutional.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 06 2016, @10:37PM
The matter of who got the promotions is not going to be hard to determine and if it turns out that they were going primarily to women ... The standards involved are fairly low for civil cases, so they just have to show that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it was discriminatory
Where are all the red pillars to shout you down? Don't you know it's equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes! Or does that sophistry only apply to other groups?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 07 2016, @02:25AM
The last few courses about gender (and other protected classes) discrimination I was forced to take at my employers said that I have to report the discrimination (to HR, or whatever - there was a long tree). If I don't they say I loose the right to go after the company. Is it true? And if it is not, can I use the courses as an evidence of the discrimination or at least as an attempt to cover?
Sorry for anonymous..
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Dunbal on Sunday February 07 2016, @04:04AM
If I don't they say I loose the right to go after the company. Is it true?
IANAL but I don't think companies get the right to tack on their own bits of policy to a country's laws. It is up to them to obey the law of the land, period. Them telling you that there is some sort of exception to the law where you have to take steps is pure BS, unless the law specifically states that is the case. Now since it's civil not criminal law it is possible if you signed a contract with your employer that they shoved in some sort of arbitration/mediation clause in there - in which case it's up to you to get legal advice. Notwithstanding, courts usually take a dim view of companies that try to pull fast ones like that in order to get around laws that were, after all, designed to protect you the employee.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday February 07 2016, @05:15AM
There's no legal requirement to do that here. But failing to do so may affect any final judgment as you're typically required to minimise the harm done.
That being said you may not know that it's, for example, sexual harassment until after you've been fired or denied a promotion as teasing isn't usually enough to count.
But, Ianal, consult with a competent professional in your area I'd you want legal advice. Or the government body in charge of enforcement at the state or federal level.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Sunday February 07 2016, @02:26PM
Exerpts from ranking that may pay Yahoo into a corner:
Employee Has Vagina:
[ ] Yes: +10
[ ] No: 0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 08 2016, @11:29AM
> internal promotions he said were limited to female candidates.
Yay! Equality[1]!
[1] Equality (eh-qwo-lay-tea): Discrimination against certain people based in irrelevant attributes.