Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has faced complaints for years from former and current Black employees alleging that the tech giant engages in racial discrimination. Now, former Google employee April Curley has filed a class-action suit against the company regarding its alleged wrongdoings.
The suit was filed by Curley on Friday, March 18, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Curley worked at Google for six years until she was fired in 2020.
"Google is engaged in a nationwide pattern or practice of intentional race discrimination and retaliation and maintains employment policies and practices that have a disparate impact against Black employees throughout the United States," Curley's complaint reads.
Like the other Black employees who have made complaints against Google, Curley is claiming that Google systematically places Black employees in lower status jobs relative to their experience. According to employee complaints, otherwise qualified Black candidates were overlooked for being not "Googly" enough, something the complaint calls a "dog whistle" for the company's racial discrimination.
There is data to back up these claims: in a 2021 diversity report, Google said that just 4.4% of its workforce was made up of employees who identified as Black or Black and another race. That rate can be compared to the 9.1% national average for tech companies like Google, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Google says core value No. 1 is to work with great people," Curley's attorney Ben Crump told reporters at a press conference. "When you take the allegations of these minorities, and you look at the data, then one would conclude that apparently, Google believes great people are white people. Where, with this lawsuit, we're proclaiming to Google that Black people and brown people are great people, too."
Along with racist hiring practices, the complaint also alleges that Google created or allowed a hostile working environment for Black employees. Curley says that during her six years with the company, she was routinely mistaken for one of her two other Black female colleagues by management.
Curley also stated that she and her Black female coworkers were also barred from speaking or presenting at important meetings. Curley's own pay was allegedly reduced after she spoke up in a team meeting and challenged management practices in 2019. She was fired in fall of the following year.
"These women tried to ring the alarm, tried to raise awareness about the discriminatory and bigoted culture," Crump said. "And Google did not retaliate against the racist culture. Google retaliated against the victims of the racist culture."
Since filing her complaint, Curley has been joined in the plaintiff class by another former employee, Chloe Sledd. Sledd says that when she went to Google's Human Resources to report that she was being repeatedly sexually harassed by a male coworker, she was reassigned to a new department and repeatedly passed over for promotion, while the male coworker went unpunished.
"After that interview, I never heard anything," Sledd said at the press conference. "I never got a formal response from the company addressing my experiences and offering any kind of results. The white male continued his job at Google and I was expected to maintain the same performance despite being a victim of sexual harassment on their watch."
"Racial insensitivity was common in their day-to-day chatter," Sledd continued. "So when I tried to speak up about that, our head of our team told me not to complain and to 'just get along.' ... It was awful."
Sledd says that she eventually resigned from Google after it became clear that management was looking for reasons to complain about her performance and threaten her position despite her high ratings.