alt Hacker NewsNotice of collective action lawsuit against Workday, Inc.
Comments
Age discrimination is a huge issue and I've experienced it firsthand. Places want to hire younger people because they're more apt to work longer hours for less pay. It's going to get worse as people who got into the web tech industry early on are still in the workforce, yet more and more young people are entering the workforce because "learning to code" was the perceived path to prosperity half a decade ago.
It will be fascinating to see the facts of this case, but if it is proven their algorithms are discriminatory, even by accident, I hope workday is held accountable. Making sure your AI doesn't violate obvious discrimination laws should be basic engineering practice, and the courts should help remind people of that.
As someone over 40, I couldn't help but laugh at the font size on the site.. I guess they know their audience.
Regardless of merit, this seems like appropriate payback for having to make a new workday account for every single company you apply to a job.
> allegations include that Workday, Inc., through its use of certain Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) features on its job application platform, violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”)
I'm interested to see Workday's defense in this case. Will it be "we can't be held liable for our AI", and will it work against a law as "strong" as ADEA?
As I remember, Workday was found when a founder is in his 60s.
Feel bad for the next guy who wants to sue them but has to settle for workdaycase2 .com
I never liked these "trust me bro we're court authorized, give us all your PII to join the class action" setups on random domains. Makes phishing seem inevitable. Why can't we have a .gov that hosts all these as subdomains?
Oh snap.
Key part is that AI is suspected of down-ranking folks by age (ADEA = Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
> The Court has provisionally certified an ADEA collective, which includes: “All individuals aged 40 and over who, from September 24, 2020, through the present, applied for job opportunities using Workday, Inc.’s job application platform and were denied employment recommendations.” In this context, being “denied” an “employment recommendation” means that (i) the individual’s application was scored, sorted, ranked, or screened by Workday’s AI; (ii) the result of the AI scoring, sorting, ranking, or screening was not a recommendation to hire; and (iii) that result was communicated to the prospective employer, or the result was an automatic rejection by Workday.