A manager at Facebook and two Black professionals who unsuccessfully applied for jobs at the social media company filed a class action employment discrimination charge against Facebook Thursday on behalf of its Black employees, alleging a “pattern or practice of discrimination against Black employees, including in evaluations, promotions, and pay.”
KEY FACTS
The complaint calls for “dramatic change” within Facebook, and asks the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate the company for allegedly violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the District of Columbia Human Rights Act, and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.
The complaint was brought by Facebook operations program manager Oscar Veneszee Jr. “on behalf of himself and all other Black workers at Facebook,” as well as by Howard Winns Jr. and Jazsmin Smith, who allege they were turned down for roles at Facebook they applied for because they are Black; the complainants say they are committed to working with Facebook to bring about changes.
Facebook’s workforce is only 3.8% Black, and Black workers make up only 1.5% of technical workers and 3.1% of senior leadership—percentages that have largely not increased, the complaint notes, even as Facebook’s workforce has grown by 400% over the past five years.
Veneszee Jr. alleges he has faced “significant challenges, racial discrimination, and hostility” at Facebook because of his race, including being told to have the right “tone” to be successful; being “criticized for offering constructive thoughts about diversity”; and “struggl[ing] to receive a fair evaluation and receive a promotion.”
The complaint specifies practices at Facebook that are allegedly discriminatory against Black employees, including putting weight on “culture fit” in hiring and relying on recommendations from largely white and Asian-American employees; requiring that racial discrimination complaints be arbitrated in a “secret forum”; and the company’s “promotion of or failure to mitigate racial bias, hostility, and stereotypes” against Black workers.
Facebook defended its commitment to preventing discrimination in the workplace in a statement to Forbes, saying the company “believe[s] it is essential to provide all employees with a respectful and safe working environment.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“There may be Black Lives Matter posters on Facebook’s walls, but Black workers don’t see that phrase reflecting how they are treated in Facebook’s own workplace,” the complaint alleges. “Donating millions of dollars to civil rights organizations does not wash away or justify the unfairness, inequality, and hostility that Black workers experience every day at Facebook—when they are turned down for jobs for which they are exceedingly qualified, when they are unfairly evaluated by mostly white peers and managers, when they are denied promotions by overwhelmingly white managers, when they are reprimanded or criticized for sharing their constructive views about diversity, when their lower pay reflects these systemic biases, and when they are assumed to not match the white-dominated “culture fit” that drives so many employment decisions at Facebook.”
CHIEF CRITIC
“We take any allegations of discrimination seriously and investigate every case,” a Facebook company spokesperson said regarding the EEOC complaint.
KEY BACKGROUND
This is not the first time that Facebook has been publicly accused of racial discrimination: Black employees at a Facebook data center sued the company for racial discrimination in 2016; former employee Mark S. Luckie wrote a post in 2018 alleging that “Facebook has a black people problem”; and 12 Facebook employees of color wrote on Medium in November 2019 that they are “treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here.” (Thursday’s complaint alleges that Facebook managers responded to the employees’ 2019 post by “dismiss[ing] their personal examples of hostile treatment and racism as mostly due to inexperienced managers.”)
TANGENT
Amid the broader movement for racial justice in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, hundreds of high-profile companies have joined an advertising boycott of Facebook to pressure the company to address how it handles hate speech, and Democratic senators recently sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding the company address the prevalence of white supremacists on its platform. “While Facebook has attempted to publicly align itself with [the racial justice] movement,” the senators wrote, “its failure to address the hate spreading on its platform reveals significant gaps between Facebook’s professed commitment to racial justice and the company’s actions and business interests.”
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Source: Forbes
