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March 9, 2027

I wrote March 9, 2027 on a piece of paper. I am looking at it in September.

That is when a federal judge is scheduled to hear whether a discrimination case against Workday can proceed as a class action. Not when the applicants get paid. Not when anyone is guaranteed a job. A hearing about whether people who say hiring software helped exclude them can pursue their claims together.

I understand why courts take time. I would want evidence examined before anybody pronounced me guilty, and I would not waive that courtesy for a software company merely because I dislike its advertising. But a man looking for work cannot put his appetite on the court calendar.

So I want to go backward. The hearing is where the lawyers are headed. I want to get back to the person who was trying to get hired.

September 2026

The applicants have asked for four subclasses: Black applicants, women, people over forty, and people with disabilities who were subjected to the screening they challenge. These are proposed groups, not a finding that everybody in them was discriminated against. Workday says they cannot meet the requirements to proceed as a class.

One question is whether the alleged harm came from shared features of the software or from separate decisions by separate employers. Workday says its customers can customize the system and decide how to sort, review, and reject applications. The plaintiffs say the software itself contributes to unequal outcomes.

I can follow the distinction. I can also imagine being unemployed while people argue about which part of the arrangement was responsible for not employing me. The answer matters enormously in court. At the grocery store it buys nothing yet.

Each rejection arrives separately. To bring the claims together, the applicants have to show what the rejections share.

An applicant does not get a list of the others. He gets his message. Somewhere else, somebody gets hers. Each person sits alone with an answer that may seem to say something about who they are.

I have supplied my own reasons for enough failures. Too old. Not polished enough. Should have stayed at the last place. Should have left sooner. There is no shortage of explanations when the only person available to cross-examine is yourself.

A lawsuit cannot make every rejection unjust. It can at least ask whether those separate rooms contain a common problem. I would like that question answered before the people in them have learned to call the whole thing a defect of character.

2025

The judge allowed the age-discrimination claims to proceed as a collective action, a separate opt-in proceeding for those claims. It was a procedural advance, not a verdict that Workday had discriminated.

I know that litigation can move forward without a person’s life feeling as though it has moved an inch. A good day in court need not be a good day anywhere else.

And job hunting creates its own paperwork. Every unsuccessful month is another month a future interviewer might ask about. Why the gap? What were you doing? I find something vicious in the possibility that time spent trying to establish whether you were unfairly excluded can later require an explanation of its own.

I am not saying that happened here. I am saying the clock is allowed to keep working on the applicant while everyone determines whether the screening worked properly.

2024

Judge Rita Lin let the disparate-impact allegations proceed. She rejected claims of intentional discrimination. Under the surviving theory, a hiring rule can look neutral and still be unlawful if it falls harder on a protected group and cannot be justified by business necessity.

An ugly motive is not the only way to produce an ugly result. That should not be difficult to understand, but I have watched grown men spend whole careers explaining that nobody meant anything by it.

Workday denies wrongdoing. It says its tools look at job qualifications, not protected traits such as race, age, or disability. The applicants allege that training on an employer’s existing workforce can reproduce the bias already in that workforce. I don’t know what the evidence will establish.

What interests me is that the plaintiffs’ lawyer is not telling a story about a machine going wild. He says a system might operate exactly as designed and still carry old discrimination forward.

I don’t find that comforting. I find it more frightening than a malfunction. If something breaks, at least the word broken gives everyone permission to stop admiring it. If it is doing the assigned job, somebody has to question the assignment.

I have known supervisors who thought a good employee was somebody who reminded them of a good employee they already knew. They called this experience. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they had simply arranged never to be surprised by anyone unlike themselves.

A machine ought to improve on that. I would welcome one that did. I am not interested in preserving the old bastard’s prejudices as an endangered craft. But I want evidence of the improvement, not the comforting absence of a bastard I can point to.

2023

Derek Mobley brought the case after repeated rejections for financial, IT help-desk, and customer-service jobs. He says employers using Workday’s hiring tools turned him down more than a hundred times, often within hours.

More than a hundred rejections do not, by themselves, prove discrimination. They do tell me why somebody might stop revising his résumé long enough to ask what was happening to it.

I keep going backward, past the complaint, past the rejection that made him suspect a pattern. I cannot know which one that was. I will not put words in his mouth or invent the room he was sitting in.

I know the particular effort of trying to sound neither desperate nor pleased with myself. I know how long a short letter can take when I need something from the person receiving it.

Then the question about when I could start.

Monday would be good.

Source: COMMENTARY: These workers say an AI hiring platform discriminated against them. But who should pay?