Palantir Technologies Inc., which was accused of racial discrimination against Asian people in it’s selection and joining processes for engineering jobs, has finally reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor over a lawsuit in association with the aforementioned case.
The California based Palantir Technologies Inc. is basically a private software and IT company which specializes in big data analysis. The company was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and others with the aim of solving the biggest problems of the most eminent institutions in the world.
As a part of the reconciliation, Palantir will have to pay $1.7 million in the form of back wages and other types of monetary relief, like stock value options, to the affected people. Eight qualified people will also be extended a job offer by the company.
Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs Acting Director Thomas Dowd said in a statement:
We appreciate Palantir working with us to resolve these issues. Together, we will ensure that the company complies with equal employment opportunity laws in its recruitment, hiring and other employment practices.
As per the DoL’s suit filed last September, Palantir was accused of following a recruitment process which discriminated against the applicants from Asia, who were coming in for roles of software engineers, by routinely eliminating qualified Asian applicants in the resume screening and telephone interview phases and then hiring most of the employees from a non-Asian background.
The very next month, Palantir presented a 15-page filing in which it announced that no discrimination has been made against the Asians. Palantir stated that the allegations “were entirely unfounded and based solely on a flawed statistical analysis. It also said that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs has undergone some miscalculations in evaluating the quality of applicants.
A Palantir spokesperson told TechCrunch:
We disagree with the allegations made by the Department of Labor. We settled this matter, without any admission of liability, in order to focus on our work. We continue to stand by our employment record and are glad to have resolved this case.
