You may have heard that the OFCCP announced that it reached a settlement with Comcast on Thursday April 30, 2015. Per the settlement terms, Comcast will pay $53,633 in back pay and interest to 96 current and former female employees and $133,366 in back pay and interest to 100 Asian, African-American and Hispanic applicants to their call center at its Everett, Washington location. Comcast is alleged to have steered female applicants toward lower paying positions assisting customers with cable services, and away from higher paying positions assisting customers with Internet services, because those positions were “technical”. Additionally, the OFCCP alleged that Comcast rejected a disproportionate number of Asians, African-Americans and Hispanics for positions at their call center.
The settlement terms, in and of themselves, may not do much to grab the contractor community’s attention. The OFCCP investigates and enters into settlements with contractors in violation of Affirmative Action laws all the time. Comcast is not the first federal contractor to be accused of job steering, or of failing to hire a disproportionate number of applicants for certain types of positions. The settlement, while significant, is clearly not a record amount for the OFCCP. The OFCCP has entered into settlements for far larger – and far smaller—amounts. While the settlement may not seem significant, the case should be enough for the contractor community to sit up and take notice. Let’s look a little deeper to see why.
The alleged violations would have occurred in 2006 and 2007. The OFCCP issued a Notice of Violation in March 2011. It took more than four years for the parties to enter into a Conciliation Agreement. It is not clear why it should have taken so long to resolve the case, and perhaps that does not really matter to the rest of us. What does – or should– matter is the following:
• The case involved 196 applicants/employees at just one of Comcast’s locations. This in turn tells us that the practices themselves were on a significant scale;
• The fact that so many applicants/employees were on the receiving end of deliberately illegal treatment shows that Comcast, at best, failed to adequately monitor its compliance with Affirmative Action laws and regulations at its Everett, Washington location;
• The OFCCP’s investigation started with practices dating back to 2006; Comcast received its Notice of Violation 5 years later; it took another 4 years to reach a settlement. During that entire time, Comcast would have endured significant disruption and scrutiny and would have had to either divert or procure – and then expend an unbelievable amount of time and resources to address a situation that likely could have been avoided – or least significantly minimized.
• Finally the fact that the OFCCP spent so much time to obtain a settlement, that, while not anywhere near its largest, shows that if the OFCCP smells discriminatory practices, it will not let up until it achieves what it believes to be a satisfactory result – even if it must hand in there for close to a decade.
For all these reasons, contractors should take notice – and then make sure to monitor their own practices to ensure fair opportunities for all.
For more information, contact Ahmed Younies at (714) 426-2918, x. 1, or [email protected].