Dive Brief:
- Job applicants are not entitled to disparate impact protection under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act like employees are, Workday argued in a court document filed Wednesday.
- Arguing that age bias claims included in an early January amended complaint filed in the ongoing Mobley v. Workday lawsuit should be dismissed, Workday said the law’s “plain language” precludes job applicants from pursuing a disparate impact claim. Attorneys for the plaintiff did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
- In the lawsuit against Workday, first filed in 2023, a class of applicants alleged the company’s AI tools discriminated based on age and other factors. The lawsuit was approved as a nationwide collective action in February of last year.
Dive Insight:
Workday leaned on legal precedent in arguing the court should drop the plaintiffs’ disparate impact claim.
“Both the Seventh and the Eleventh Circuits — in en banc decisions that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review — held that the ADEA does not permit disparate impact claims by job applicants,” the company said.
Workday argued that while certain provisions of the ADEA apply to both job applicants and employees — such as the section related to labor organization practices — the provision making it unlawful for employers to “limit, segregate or classify” individuals in such a way that it would deprive or tend to deprive individuals of employment opportunities or adversely affect their status refers only to employees.
In a statement sent Friday, Workday told HR Dive the claims in the lawsuit were false.
“Our products, both AI-enabled and not, are built to help our customers manage an ever-increasing volume of applicants with a focus on human decision-making. Workday’s AI recruiting tools are not trained to use — or even identify — protected characteristics like race, age, or disability,” Connor Spielmaker, a spokesperson for the company, said.
The lawsuit against Workday has spotlit the potential dangers for employers in adopting AI-based hiring tools. Last summer, a judge ordered the company to supply an exhaustive list of employers that enabled its HiredScore technology in their hiring processes.
An increasing number of states and jurisdictions have begun to regulate the use of AI in hiring; California, for example, requires employers to provide the opportunity to opt out of automated hiring tools as well as perform risk assessments of such tools.
