US$5 Billion Discrimination Suit Filed

Microsoft has been hit with a US$5 billion class-action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination. The case, which will be heard by Microsoft’s nemesis in its antitrust case, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, is the third discrimination suit filed against the company in the last year and could conceivably involve as many as 400 former and current employees.

The Complaint

The new complaint seeks to amend a complaint filed in summer 2000 by Rahn Jackson in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. A former account executive in Microsoft’s Washington, D.C., office, plaintiff Jackson said the three black members of his team were passed over while other, less-qualified employees were promoted. The amended suit adds six named plaintiffs and seeks to open the suit to other blacks employed at Microsoft since Apr. 1992—an estimated 400 people, according to plaintiffs’ lawyers. The plaintiffs hope to prove that the company’s subjective employee-evaluation process allowed supervisors to pass over black employees for raises and promotions and contributed to a hostile work environment.