Uncle Sam sues Oracle for 'screwing over Asian, black and women staff' Oracle could lose its lucrative US government IT contracts after the Department of Labor accused the tech giant of racial and gender discrimination. The DoL has filed a lawsuit [PDF] with the US Office of Administrative Law Judges alleging that Oracle's pay grades violate the labor bod's rules against pay and employment …
"Specifically, OFCCP found gross disparities in pay even after controlling for job title, full-time status, exempt status, global career level, job speciality, estimated prior work experience, and company tenure."
Estimated? What about time served?
Let's says I have two employee's and one consistently works late, does extra work and goes above and beyond what is asked or I have one that is technically more proficient at the task at hand. Does anyone think they would stay on the same pay for long even though they have technically the same job?
Who does this benefit? Would an employer not look at this and think I'll just employ less minorities because then I am less likely to be sued?
Estimated? What about time served?
Estimated prior work experience -- not everyone's past work history is readily available.
Let's says I have two employee's and one consistently works late, does extra work and goes above and beyond what is asked or I have one that is technically more proficient at the task at hand. Does anyone think they would stay on the same pay for long even though they have technically the same job?
Are you suggesting that white male workers consistently go above and beyond what minorities and women do? That's implicit in your "hypothetical" scenario here. Assuming that is racist and sexist, and proving that is incredibly difficult.
Who does this benefit? Would an employer not look at this and think I'll just employ less minorities because then I am less likely to be sued?
Why would an employer look at this and think anything other than "if my hiring and salary determination processes are based on anything other than a deterministic equation based on measurable factors directly related to the employee's effectiveness at the job, then I'm in danger of being sued."
Because that's all this means. And ironically, that's the best way of running a business anyway.
I made no distinction in my assertion about who pay and rates would be different for. Who is to say that while the majority of the majority are paid more there is a minority of the minority that get paid more than the majority. Pay within the workplace is also not determined just by skill or title and whether right or wrong a boss may give a pay rise higher to someone who gives a benefit to the workplace that is not measured by skill.
It's easy to say that minorities are getting paid less then sue the company but would it not be better to educate the workers about the salaries they are getting so they can then take the company to task either by demanding equal pay or moving to another company that pays equally?
Also, lets be honest here, where do minorities come from? They come from other countries where sometimes the pay is less for the job they are doing so accept lower pay. This is how companies work, they will pay the least they think they can get away with and yes that is wrong.
Are you suggesting that white male workers consistently go above and beyond what minorities and women do? That's implicit in your "hypothetical" scenario
I didn't see anything in his scenario that would have implied that, you seem to be making an unwarranted assumtpion, perhaps based on your own biases.
In my experience the employees who "consistently work late, do extra work and go above and beyond what is asked" tend to be the new college hires who are still having lots of fun, and don't have families expecting them home at 6pm for dinner, or for weekends. They're also cheaper, just because they aren't as far up the career ladder. That doesn't imply any discriminatory effect on the part of the employer, for age or anything else.
One problem here is that economy is not constant. Two employees join fresh out of college five years apart and behave exactly the same. The first one will have a family and children after five years and limit his engagement outside of what is required, while the second one will do a lot of overtime at the same time.
If the first one joins when the economy is booming, his eager attitude will net him a higher salary, while the second one will feel left out; that despite his extra hours, he's not getting the appreciation and pay he feels he deserves.
In tech companies, the first one could have joined in 1997/8 and the second one in 2002/3. Then compare the salaries of the first one in 2005 and the second one in 2010. There's bound to be a huge disparity.
Or conversely, the first one joins in a slump, while the other one joins when the economy has recovered. The first one would have worked his ass off for no salary increase, and would miss out when there are raises at the company. Or promotions.
There are so many variables that it's literally impossible to account for all of them when evaluating if the pay is equitable.
I'm not arguing that the suit should be dropped and that the case should not be investigated, but this may fizzle out completely and there will be a lot of money wasted down that particular avenue.
Even the candidates are cyclical.
New programmers we hired in the late 90s were real computer nerds - they had started CS degrees in the early 90s when it wasn't cool. The candidates available in 2005 had all jumped into "Java Schools" when the dot com boom started and were much lower quality.
The support contracts for them are not. The real money spent by the customers and vendors building on top is not in the database, it is in what they pay for it to be supported.
Also, Oracle is not just databases - it is ERP, Finance and HR packages sitting on top of them. I am not aware of anything free in that area which is worth mentioning. I would have loved to be able to get away from those, but the alternatives are either even more expensive and cumbersome (SAP) or rather limited in their functionality and scale (Microsoft and Co).
I quite agree but a lot of companies want to "pull out the software out of the box" and have it run a 2PB DB, with their skilled staff having the information available to them immediately on how to do it, they do not want to have to re-engineer the software to do it. I'm not saying you can't get PG or MYSQL ( thinking traditional RDBMS here, not big data ) to run petabyte DBs but it's not something they do out of the box easily without a lot of re-engineering. MYSQL only got correlated sub-queries in the last few years, PG only recently got partitioned tables, just two examples of things that have been in Oracle and SQL Server, DB2 for years. When you start going beyond 50TB for most of your databases in a company as I do regularly you need things like partitioning, multi-threaded backup streams and a whole host of other stuff to get jobs done. Running a couple of hundred 10GB databases can be done using PG and MYSQL by most competent sysadmins but when you start playing in the big-boy sized databases then it takes a different kind of software. Sure Oracle is a bit of dinosaur but it's been bashed into shape to handle petabyte sized systems out of the box.
Oracle designs and sells vapor, which they sell as "Cloud". Or at least try to.
So, no one can buy an Oracle brand SPARC Solaris system? When did this happen? HOLY CRAP, or CARP! Somebody better shut down these obviously forged web pages! To whit:
https://www.oracle.com/servers/sparc/index.html
Surely, I cannot build my own cloudy SPARCy thingy?!
> To whit:
According to Webster:
whit: noun
the smallest part or particle imaginable
I don't think that's what you were trying to say, but your spelling mistake turned out to be semantically correct. At least insofar as Solaris and SPARC are concerned.
Now go build your cloudy SPARC vaporware.
Yes Minister (Series 3, Episode 1) where all the [white, public schooled / Oxbridge] senior civil service management prove they are diverse bunch of chaps! In fact you couldn't get a more diverse representation of the population...
Note for those not familiar with the British education system:
In Britain public schools are private schools and public schools are just school
Oxbridge = Oxford and Cambridge Universities
"The complaint is politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit. Oracle values diversity and inclusion, and is a responsible equal opportunity and affirmative action employer,"
reminds me of Yes Minister (Series 3, Episode 1) where the all white, public school /Oxbridge senior civil service management affirm to everyone (themselves) in the room that they are indeed a diverse bunch of people - in fact you couldn't really get a more diverse group...
For those not familiar with British educational concepts:
a private fee based school is known as a public school. A school for the general population is known as a [public] school... (there is a legitimate, valid and quite reasonable history but these days more of a "go figure" thing)
Oxbridge is the Oxford and Cambridge Universities
You can't refuse to hand data over and then say:
"The complaint is politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit. Oracle values diversity and inclusion, and is a responsible equal opportunity and affirmative action employer,"
"Our hiring and pay decisions are non-discriminatory and made based on legitimate business factors including experience and merit."
Refusing to hand over data just makes you look guilty.
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