Goodyear to Pay $925,000 to Settle Employment Discrimination Case
According to a recent New York Times article, The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company has agreed to pay $925,000 to hundreds of women who were denied tire-building jobs at its Virginia plant, the Labor Department announced Tuesday.
The payment is part of a consent decree approved by an administrative law judge to resolve a lawsuit the Labor Department filed last year on behalf of 800 women who were denied jobs at the plant in Danville, Va., over a year-and-a-half period in the late 1990s.
As a federal contractor, the company is prohibited from employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
The human resources manager at Danville, John Rhodes, said in a statement, “While we do not believe that our past hiring practices were discriminatory, this settlement is in the best interest of the company.”
He said the company wanted to avoid “the cost and distraction of protracted litigation with the federal government.”
The department sued in June, asserting that from January 1998 to June 1999, Goodyear followed “a hiring process and selection procedures that discriminated against hundreds of female applicants for entry-level positions on the basis of gender.”
As part of the decree, Goodyear will hire up to 60 of the women who still want to work at the plant, provided they satisfy Goodyear’s new requirements for entry-level jobs.
The company also agreed to conduct annual training for managers on equal-employment opportunity and affirmative action.
Bookmark: 
