Palantir has reached a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor over a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against Asian people in the company’s hiring and selection processes for engineering roles.
As part of the agreement, Palantir will pay $1.7 million in back wages and other types of monetary relief, like stock value options, to those affected. Palantir will also extend job offers to eight eligible people. I wonder if those people would still want to work at Palantir, but I guess that’s besides the point.
“We appreciate Palantir working with us to resolve these issues,” Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs Acting Director Thomas Dowd said in a statement. “Together, we will ensure that the company complies with equal employment opportunity laws in its recruitment, hiring and other employment practices.”
According to the DoL’s suit filed last September, Palantir allegedly used a hiring process that discriminated against Asian applicants for software engineering roles, “routinely eliminated” qualified Asian applicants in the resume screening and telephone interview phases and hired a majority of people from its discriminatory employee referral system.
The following month, Palantir broke its silence about the suit in a 15-page filing, saying that it did not discriminate against Asian people. Palantir said the allegations “were entirely unfounded and based solely on a flawed statistical analysis.” Palantir also said that the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs made a mistake in evaluating the quality of applicants.
“We disagree with the allegations made by the Department of Labor,” a Palantir spokesperson told TechCrunch via email today. “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.”