Google to pay $50M to settle Black racial bias suit

Google to pay $50M to settle Black employee racial bias suit

Google agreed to pay $50 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the search engine company of systemic racial bias against Black employees.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - Google is set to pay $50 million to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming it paid Black workers less.

The decision was made on Friday in the Oakland courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Kandis Westmore.

Plaintiffs April Curley, Desiree Mayon, Ronkia Lewis, Rayna Reid, Anim Aweh and Ebony Thomas sued Google in 2022, alleging they were paid  lower wages and denied advancement opportunities at the Mountain View, Calif., search engine giant. One of their lawyers is high-profile civil rights attorney Ben Crump of Florida. 

Curley, the lead plaintiff, alleged that she had been stereotyped as an "angry" Black woman by supervisors and said that no action was taken after filing official complaints of discriminatory management behavior with Google’s HR department in 2020.

Instead, Curley was retaliated against and ultimately fired, her complaint alleged.

Plus, Curley alleged that the tech giant hires few Black employees, particularly at the leadership level, and pushes "those few Black employees into lower-level roles," leading them to be underpaid.

About 4,000 Black current and former Google employees in New York and California will share in the settlement money. 

Google said in a statement that the agreement involved no admission of wrongdoing, the Bay Area News Group reported. 

Under the agreement, Google will "continue to analyze pay to identify unexplained differences based on race," and will"maintain well-publicized methods for employees to report concerns related to the terms and conditions of their employment," a court filing last week said. 

This is not the first payout of its kind. 

In March, Google agreed to pay more than 6,000 current and former Latino, indigenous and Pacific Islander employees $28 million to settle a different class-action lawsuit claiming it paid white and Asian workers more, the Bay Area News Group reported.

And in 2022, Google agreed to pay $118 million to thousands of women to settle a lawsuit accusing it of gender pay discrimination in the workplace.