Federal officials have accused software giant Oracle of pursuing discriminatory hiring practices in the United States that resulted in underpayment of 400 million U.S. dollars to thousands of black, Asian and female employees, a federal complaint showed Tuesday.
The updated complaint, filed by the Department of Labor in a two-year-old lawsuit, alleged that the Redwood City, California-based company underpaid the underrepresented employees by 400 million dollars over four years.
"Oracle's suppression of pay for its non-White, non-male employees is so extreme that it persists and gets worse over long careers; female, Black, and Asian employees with years of experience are paid as much as 25 percent less than their peers," said the document.
It said that Oracle, one of the largest technology firms in the world, was practicing a discriminatory hiring policy by preferring to recruit Asians who depended on the company's sponsorship for visas to stay in the United States and took up jobs with underpaid salaries.
The company also steered Asian, black and female employees into lower paid jobs, with more than 5,000 women getting paid 20 percent less than their male colleagues in 2016, said the document filed by the Department of Labor Office of Administrative Law Judges based in San Francisco, California.
More than 11,000 Asian employees have been underpaid, with disparities as high as 8 percent, according to the complaint.
Oracle has yet to make any comment about the complaint.
The Department of Labor estimated that Oracle, as one of the top tech firms in Silicon Valley, gets government contracts totaling more than 100 million dollars annually.
Oracle, which offers cloud computing services to businesses around the world, has more than 70 offices in the United States.
