[rchaud]

Got any evidence for that? Is Google in the habit of paying out giant HR-related settlements for something other than protecting good ol' boys like Andy Rubin?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/andy-rubin-google-settlement-se...

Google has enough money to hire the best law firms too. Why would any law firm engage in frivolous litigation against a potential future client?

The linked settlement is 10X that of this one, which if paid, would be divided among 6,600 people. Not exactly a huge payday.

[reissbaker]

As another commenter pointed out elsewhere, Google recently paid out a settlement claiming that it discriminated against Asians. https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20210201 This settlement claims they favored Asians, but Google paid it out too!

So, yes, it appears Google is in the habit of paying out contradictory settlements rather than litigating them.

[GordonS]

Google is a huge organisation, so both claims could certainly be true.

[tdb7893]

One thing I will note is that both of these can be true. Google is a huge company run by a lot of people and unless the specific claims are contradictory there's nothing stopping Google from doing both. It's not like we can expect it to be run with any consistent ideology

[moate]

Getting 5 people to agree on one thing is so hard companies have Project Managers, doesn't seem unlikely that the left hand doesn't speak to the right when you get to Google scale.

[dagmx]

At the scale of Google, both claims can be true. Different teams are responsible for their hiring and management, so might have their own biases.

[pixl97]

For example if you could discriminate positively towards Chinese and negatively towards Indians and meet the claims in question.

[dionidium]

> Got any evidence for that? Is Google in the habit of paying out giant HR-related settlements for something other than protecting good ol' boys like Andy Rubin?

The state of US case law -- IANAL, this is a layman's understanding -- is that plaintiffs only have to show that there exists "disparate impact," which is to say that outcomes were not exactly the same for Asians/whites and blacks.

Two things can be true: 1) Google did not intend to discriminate, did not institute any policy designed to discriminate, did not in actual fact discriminate against non-Asian/white employees; and 2) they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.

So, yes, I think there are indeed situations in which they'd pay out settlements knowing full well they've done nothing morally or ethically dubious.

[rchaud]

That is not evidence of a shakedown by a corporate law firm, which is the original allegation.

Google, Apple and others have colluded to not poach employees from each other, distorting a free labor market, and settled that for $400m.[0]

[0]https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

It's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that individual managers at Google had discriminatory promotion practices. Google picks up the legal tab for their alleged malfeasance, because they empower managers to make those decisions.

If it is so easy to squeeze some cash out of a major company, I'd imagine Google, Apple and many others in California would be cutting checks left and right to dodge lawsuits alleging violations of the state's Equal Pay Act, which saw its last major update in 2018, enacted into law in Jan 2019.[1]

https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/california_equal_pay_act.htm

[fallingknife]

> they could still be held liable for hiring results that look like discrimination in a single-variable analysis.

If anything shows that our liability laws and adjudication process is written by lawyers for lawyers it's rules like this.

[rachofsunshine]

Also NAL but I don't think you're correct about this.

First: the standard isn't relevant to a nuisance suit, since by definition you don't expect to win a nuisance suit anyway.

But setting that aside, disparate impact requires a significant difference in outcome and can be defended against by showing that the standards are relevant to job performance ("business necessity"). That's true for both the federal Civil Rights Act and the California Equal Pay Act (which is what this suit was brought under). So a "single variable analysis" isn't the end of the story, and employers can (and often do) provide statistical arguments that their policies satisfy business necessity.

I'd suggest looking up the case (Griggs v. Duke Power Co.) that established the disparate impact standard in the first place. TLDR, a company that had explicitly discriminatory Jim Crow-era policies banning black employees from certain departments adopted new requirements on the day the Civil Rights Act went into effect. Those requirements hadn't been in place before, Duke Power could not show any actual connection with job performance, and white employees were two to ten times more likely to satisfy them. A unanimous court (which, as a fun trivia fact, included an open former member of the Klan!) said nope, can't do that.

[ThrowawayTestr]

>Why would any law firm engage in frivolous litigation against a potential future client?

Because the chances is getting a payout is greater than the chances of ever working for Google.

[zeroonetwothree]

I also doubt that Google will avoid hiring a law firm just because they were on the other side in the past.