Lawsuit: YouTube Stopped Hiring White and Asian Males to Improve Diversity

A new lawsuit alleges that YouTube stopped hiring white and Asian males to technical roles last year as they didn’t help the company improve employee diversity.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a former YouTube human resources employee has alleged in a new lawsuit that the company stopped hiring white and Asian male employees to technical roles at some point in 2017  to improve employee diversity rankings throughout the company. Arne Wilberg worked at Google for 9 years, four of which were spent at YouTube as a recruiter. Wilberg alleges that Google set quotas for the hiring of minorities at the company which resulted in discrimination against white and Asian male employees. Wilberg’s lawsuit claims that YouTube recruiters were told to cancel interviews with applicants that weren’t female, black or Hispanic and to “purge entirely” any applications that did not fit those criteria.

A Google spokesperson has stated that the company plans to defend itself entirely against the lawsuit, “We have a clear policy to hire candidates based on their merit, not their identity,” said the spokesperson. “At the same time, we unapologetically try to find a diverse pool of qualified candidates for open roles, as this helps us hire the best people, improve our culture, and build better products.”

However, many of the claims made in Wilberg’s lawsuit seem to corroborate Breitbart News’ previous reporting. One Google employee told Breitbart News, “Witch hunts are a well-known cultural problem at Google. The company is currently facing a Federal complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board in April for interfering with employees’ legal right to discuss ‘workplace diversity and social justice initiatives.’ The complaint alleges that Senior Vice President Urs Holzle and numerous managers in his organization actively stoked up witch hunts in 2015 and 2016 intended to muzzle low-level employees who raised concerns about the company’s practices.”

Wilberg’s lawsuit alleges that he faced discrimination from Google over his sex and race and retaliated against his complaints by firing him, violating antidiscrimination laws in the process. Wilberg claims that he made multiple complaints to managers about YouTube’s hiring process and escalated these complaints to superiors at Google before being fired last November. Wilberg’s lawsuit alleges that in the first quarter of 2016, YouTube recruiters were told that they were expected to hire five new employees each. Each of these new employees allegedly must have been from an underrepresented group, and recruiters used what was known as a “diversity tracker” to keep a count of the number of minorities hired.

Wilberg claims that his performance reviews began to suffer as he refused to follow YouTube’s diversity hiring agenda. He alleges that YouTube attempted to hide their blatant hiring bias and that he was told in a meeting in January 2016 that the company had to “clean up” its diversity hiring practices. Managers then reportedly deleted all emails about diversity goals in an attempt to hide them from any further scrutiny. The lawsuit alleges that sometime in mid-2017 managers were instructed to stop tracking the number of employees they hired from minority groups and told them to drop all hiring bias based on diversity quotas.

It would seem that Wilberg’s lawsuit corroborates many claims made by former Google employee and author of the famous viewpoint diversity memo, James Damore. Damore and his lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, have brought a case against Google alleging that Damore amongst other employees was fired for questioning the company’s liberal groupthink. In an interview on Breitbart News Tonight, Dhillon stated, “Well the lawsuit is punitive class-action, so we’re seeking class status. The two named plaintiffs are James Damore, who you mentioned and another fired software engineer David Gudeman, both of them are conservatives, both of them are white men. Both of them complained in the workplace about the quota system that Google has in place for hiring people and the incessant social justice warrior mentality that forces everybody at Google to toe the line with regard to hating on people who supported the President, or refusing to acknowledge people’s right to believe that there are two genders instead of multiple genders.”