
Ask HN: Is it legal for a company to restrict an internship to certain races? - workquest7
I&#x27;m a person of color working for a large tech company in San Francisco. I was disgusted to find out that we have a paid internship program that is explicitly only limited to people of certain races.<p>1) Description on website:
&quot;...is a paid 12-week summer internship program designed for second-year students interested in gaining hands-on and real-life experience in the tech industry.&quot;<p>&quot;Eligibility:
Full-time student identifying as black, Latinx, and&#x2F;or Native American completing your undergraduate study in 2021 at a university or college.&quot;<p>2) Is this legal? I am familiar with affirmative action, but all examples I have seen describe it as stuff like: &quot;language on job advertisements urging minorities to apply, or a policy that favors African-Americans when all other qualifications among job applicants are equal.&quot;. I&#x27;ve never seen a company explicitly say that only certain races are eligible. If someone can point me to some credible sources discussing this specific issue, it would be great.<p>3) Assuming this is not legal, how do I get them to stop? Based on what I know about the company, this is not the work of an unsupervised employee, but something that was likely approved by upper management. The company has an ethics hotline that guarantees confidentiality and non-retaliation, but I&#x27;ve seen the company break confidentiality and retaliate when they were promised in the past.<p>I can&#x27;t file an EEOC complaint because <i>I</i> wasn&#x27;t discriminated against. The application deadline just ended and they are now interviewing candidates.<p>I&#x27;m afraid that if this ends up being controversial, instead of stopping racial discrimination, they will just hide it better by not putting up an explicit notice. People working here seem morally fine with this sort of discrimination. They don&#x27;t seem to notice the hypocrisy of saying in huge letters &quot;[Company Name] is where inclusion lives&quot; and then linking to a page that excludes people from a job on the basis of race.
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greenyoda
> for a large tech company in San Francisco

The company is easily identifiable just by searching for the text you quoted,
so you're not really hiding which company you're working for (if that's your
intention).

As to whether this kind of discrimination is legal: I'd assume a company that
size has a huge legal department, and any corporate program they run has been
vetted by their lawyers. So there's probably some loophole in the law that
makes it legal.

By the way, offering the internship only to second-year students would be age
discrimination (it effectively excludes almost everyone older than 40, who are
a protected class under federal law), and offering it only to full-time
college students would be discriminating against people who can't afford to
attend college full-time (e.g., because they have families they need to
support).

~~~
sdinsn
> offering the internship only to second-year students would be age
> discrimination

This is not true.

> offering it only to full-time college students would be discriminating
> against people who can't afford to attend college full-time

This is also not true.

~~~
workquest7
IANAL, but it is only illegal to discriminate against protected classes. It is
legal to discriminate against people without college degrees or aren't
attending college, just as it is legal to discriminate against smokers, or
people who can't code.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group)

~~~
dragonwriter
> IANAL, but it is only illegal to discriminate against protected classes.

Age over 40 is a protected class, and anti-discrimination law protects not
only against facially or intentionally discriminatory acts, but also against
those with a disparate impact not sufficiently justified by business concerns
(though the standard for that is weaker for age discrimination than other
workplace discrimination.)

------
Digory
> I can't file an EEOC complaint because I wasn't discriminated against.

That's not quite true. I'd talk to a California employment law attorney, or a
public interest law firm that might be interested in these facts.

> People working here seem morally fine with this sort of discrimination.

This is the bigger problem, but the nondiscrimination laws were passed
precisely because some people felt morally fine with race discrimination.

~~~
eesmith
To add to that, California's Unruh Civil Rights Act is broader than the US
federal law, and the federal laws related to the EEOC don't require that
complainant be the one that was discriminated against.

The laws against retaliation hold so long as you have a "reasonable good faith
belief" that there may be a violation of the laws, and the court has a
generous interpretation of that phrase. I'll quote from
[https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/briefs/jordan2.txt](https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/briefs/jordan2.txt)
:

> ... an employee should be deemed protected from retaliation by §704(a) when
> he reports conduct by a coworker or supervisor which, if repeated often
> enough, would create a hostile work environment. Several courts have held
> such complaints protected, often by applying a generous standard in
> determining whether the plaintiff's belief was reasonable. See, e.g.,
> Alexander, 40 F.3d at 195-96 (summarized supra at p. 11); Reed, 95 F.3d at
> 1174-80 (summarized supra at p. 11); Moyo v. Gomez, 40 F.3d 982, 985 (9th
> Cir. 1994) (black corrections officer believed prison's practice of allowing
> white inmates, but not black inmates, to shower after work shifts violated
> Title VII; he complained and was fired; court held that even if these
> inmates would not be considered employees for Title VII purposes,
> plaintiff's belief might still have been reasonable, and the district court
> accordingly erred in dismissing his claim); id. at 984 ("An erroneous belief
> that an employer engaged in an unlawful employment practice is reasonable,
> and thus actionable under § 704(a), if premised on a mistake made in good
> faith. A good-faith mistake may be one of fact or of law.") (emphasis in
> original); ... ("[P]laintiffs alleging retaliation are not required to
> possess a good faith, reasonable belief as to every legal element necessary
> to succeed on such a claim, and are instead held only to a ‘lay person's'
> understanding of the violation . . . . It is the Court's firm conviction
> that . . . the law should not leave unprotected those employees who
> experience retaliation for reports of what they believe reasonably and in
> good faith to be a violation of the law . . . .").

You can see that the corrections officer was protected from retaliation even
though he himself was not the one being discriminated against.

But really, take Digory's advice and talk to someone with specific CA
experience.

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sethammons
I am not a lawyer, take with a grain of salt.

You can discriminate all you want, even as an employer. You just can't do so
against protected classes.

They are not discriminating against a protected class, they are discriminating
against a non-protected class. Now, if they refused a candidate because of
their sexual orientation or other protected class, then they would be
violating the law

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whttheuuu
Company is Twitter

