SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is urging Cisco Systems Inc. to settle allegations of racial discrimination against five minority job applicants or else face a lawsuit from the agency.
In rejecting four black applicants and one Asian-American applicant, the San Jose-based company "demonstrated an ongoing pattern and practice of not hiring qualified minority candidates based on their race, color and national origin (including Hispanics)," the EEOC said.
Cisco, the world's largest networking equipment maker, has disputed the allegations. The company said Thursday that 43 percent of its roughly 28,500 U.S. workers identify themselves as ethnic minorities, and that minority hiring is growing faster than overall head count growth.
"While we disagree with the allegations in this case, Cisco takes this issue very seriously," the company said in a statement.
The allegations were included in letters sent to Cisco by the EEOC and made available by lawyers for four of the five applicants who filed suit against the company in San Francisco federal court in January.
The letters urged Cisco to engage in settlement talks with the agency or risk a lawsuit. The EEOC's letters did not outline any evidence in support of its findings.
The EEOC declined to comment, saying only that it has not sued Cisco about the matter. Should Cisco be taken to court and found in violation, it could be fined a maximum of $300,000 for each aggrieved employee, according to EEOC spokesman David Grinberg.
The applicants' lawsuit claims they were passed over for jobs that were instead given to less-qualified white applicants. The plaintiffs claim they were denied employment despite scoring higher on an internal Cisco applicant ranking system than those who got jobs.
In seeking class-action status, the lawsuit criticizes Cisco's "woefully inadequate African-American and other minority representation" and accuses the company of undermining a program it launched in 2004 to boost the recruitment of black workers.
"Cisco's diversity recruiting program was impossibly and purposely Byzantine," the lawsuit states. The lawsuit claims a number of outside diversity consultants had either been fired or quit in protest of the company's track record.
In one case, the lawsuit claims, Cisco had an outside diversity consultant fired after he complained that a black applicant was interviewed for a job in a coffee shop parking lot by a Cisco manager wearing a gym suit. The applicant did not get the job.
Cisco said it employs 12,230 minority workers in the U.S. Of that, 10,152 are Asian, 1,242 are Hispanic and 758 are black. Cisco said the number of black employees increased by 12 percent over last year and is the company's fastest-growing segment of new employees.
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