One African American employee of Facebook has filed a complaint with the company’s Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, saying that Black workers are not given the same opportunities to prove their skills within the company.
Oscar Veneszee Jr., a current employee of Facebook, is the one who filed the EO complaint. NPR reported the Veneszee is a former veteran from the US navy whose job is to recruit other African Americans and veterans into the social media giant to promote diversity.
However, according to the complaints that Veneszee filed, he argued that Facebook was failing to meet the diversity goals it has set for itself as efforts to find and keep black workers within the company has been insufficient.
Veneszee himself has been working in Facebook in 2017, yet he filed the complaint along with two other African Americans that he recruited into the company. These two – Howard Winns Jr. and Jazsmin Smith – said that their applications to Facebook were disregarded because of their race.
An official spokesperson from Facebook addressed this charge, saying that all workers and applicants to the company should and have been given a fair chance to grow and compete. The spokesperson also added that the company will look into great detail the case put forth by Veneszee.
Despite the statements from the company, Facebook has long been criticized for lack of diversity and representation. Much like other Silicon Valley companies, most of the workforce for Facebook are white or Asian, with Black Americans only being 4% of the entire workforce.
NPR reports that the already meagre numbers are even lower when examining the proportion of African Americans who hold executive positions in Facebook, as only 3% of all the top-ranking officials within Facebook are black.
Veneszee argued that he was never even considered for promotion despite being praised as a natural leader within the company, a treatment he blamed his race for.
Overall, Veneszee has argued that Facebook has violated various Civil Rights laws both in-state and federal by discriminating against African American employees based on race over various issues such as hiring and promotion.
For instance, he argued that Facebook looks at whether an applicant ‘fits’ into the organization, a factor that Veneszee argued discriminates against African Americans.
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