Apple has suffered a significant setback in an enormous unequal pay lawsuit against the corporate after a female worker allegedly found a male colleague's tax form on an office printer that suggested men on the Cupertino company were paid more for a similar jobs than Women. A judge on Friday rejected the iPhone maker's try to stop legal motion.
According to her lawsuit filed in June, Justina Jong, who worked in Apple's retail and marketing division for greater than a decade, discovered the 2019 W-2 form on a printer at considered one of the corporate's Sunnyvale offices where she was worked. The document allegedly showed that the person was paid nearly $10,000 more for a similar work than Jong, who still works at Apple.
The alleged revelation led to legal motion skyrocketing, with Jong's lawyers looking for class-action status to incorporate greater than 12,000 current and former female employees in Apple's California engineering, marketing and AppleCare units.
The lawsuit alleged that until late 2017, Apple asked job applicants about their previous salaries, which resulted in the corporate paying women lower starting salaries than men for a similar work. After a California law went into effect in 2018 that prohibits employers from asking job applicants about their salary history, Apple began asking applicants about their salary expectations, the lawsuit says. Research suggests that an individual's stated salary expectations are typically only barely higher than their previous salary. Apple's use of such information to set salaries due to this fact “had the effect of perpetuating previous pay disparities and causing women to be paid less than men,” the lawsuit says.
A San Francisco Superior Court judge last week torpedoed the corporate's try to block class-action status and dismiss it.
Apple – value greater than $3 trillion on the stock market and led by CEO Tim Cook, who received a salary of $74.6 million last 12 months — didn’t reply to requests for comment on the judge's order and the claims within the lawsuit.
The company argued in a lawsuit that the main points of every women's employment and the person decisions of their supervisors made it not possible for the court to think about their allegations together in a category motion lawsuit. The company has also claimed that Jong and the opposite two named plaintiffs within the case, Amina Salgado and Zainab Bori, did not discover any company practices that resulted in unequal pay.
Judge Ethan Schulman rejected that argument in a written order Friday, ruling that evidence have to be presented to find out whether there may be a “community of interest” among the many 1000’s of potential class motion plaintiffs, or as an alternative that a category motion will not be possible due to “individual interests.” is trouble.” There is a “reasonable possibility” that the lawsuit's allegations that Apple violated California's equal pay law meet the threshold for a class action lawsuit, Schulman wrote.
In response to Apple's claim that plaintiffs' attorneys failed to identify a company practice that results in a gender pay gap, the judge ruled that plaintiffs' claim that compensation policies are “centrally determined” and applied to everyone Californian employees are applied in the same way is sufficient for the allegation of the gender gap to be addressed.
The lawsuit highlights the problem of gender discrimination in Silicon Valley's male-dominated technology industry. Mountain View digital advertising giant Google has agreed to pay $118 million to up to 15,500 women in 2022 to settle a years-long class action lawsuit against the company latest diversity reportBy placing female workers in lower pay grades than men, giving women lower-paying jobs, promoting women more slowly and less frequently, and generally paying female workers less than men for similar work, it turns out that about a third of the workforce is women. Bay Area tech giants HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise agreed to pay $1.45 million in 2020 after the U.S. Department of Labor accused them of “systemic pay discrimination” against female employees.
Apple's latest diversity report Like Google, a workforce of around a third is women.
Jong's lawsuit also alleges that from 2015 to 2022, she was sexually harassed by a senior member of Apple's “talent development team” who allegedly touched her, stared at her, and made sexually suggestive comments. Even though Jong moved to a different department, Apple allegedly pressured her to continue working with the man — who was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit — moving him to an office next to hers in March 2022 and refusing to let her move.
Apple argued that Jong's claims stemmed from a single incident in 2019, so the statute of limitations barred it from enforcing them in court. The company also claimed that Jong did not allege “severe or widespread” harassment.
Schulman pointed out that Jong claimed the harassment continued past that date, so the statute of limitations did not apply. The judge also noted that Jong claimed her colleague sexually harassed her “often” and she “became aware that the person usually commented on the attractiveness of female employees and sometimes harassed others.” If her allegations were true, Schulman wrote, one could reasonably conclude that the man's behavior was “each severe and pervasive.”
If approved by the court, the category of 1000’s of plaintiffs can be open to all women in departments who began working at Apple within the 4 years before the lawsuit was filed, in addition to those that were hired before the lawsuit was accomplished.
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