FB To Pay $14m To Settle Claims It Favoured Foreign Workers

The monetary value of the deal is negligible for Facebook, but it shows how the social media giant is facing battles with Washington regulators on multiple fronts

- ​​​​​​​David McCabe

Washington: Facebook agreed on Tuesday to pay up to $14.3 million to settle claims brought by the federal government in the waning days of the Trump administration that the company had discriminated against US workers. The justice department sued the company in December, arguing that Facebook had declined to “recruit, consider or hire” qualified US workers for thousands of positions. Instead, prosecutors said, the company gave those jobs to foreign workers who held temporary work visas.

The agreement with the justice department included payments of $4.75 million to the government and as much as $9.5 million to “eligible victims of Facebook’s alleged discrimination”, according to a news release. The combined settlement is the largest ever collected by the agency’s civil rights division for violations of the antidiscrimination provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act. The company also separately settled concerns raised by the labour department this year over whether it had violated labour regulations.