The U.S. Department of Labor said today that Oracle Corp. underpaid women and people of color, resulting in $400 million in lost wages, according to a federal filing.

“Oracle suppressed starting salaries for its female and non-White employees, assigned them to lower level positions and depressed their wages over the years they worked at Oracle,” the department said. The amount of money lost to those affected is about $400 million, said the department.

“Oracle has continued to systemically discriminate against employees and applicants based on gender and race,” said Laura Bremer, a Labor Department attorney. The company is accused of paying women, black employees and Asian employees low wages, partly because their wages were based on their previous pay histories.

The complaint alleges that out of 500 people who were hired by the firm for tech jobs over four years, only six people hired were African-American and only five of them were Hispanic. Moreover, it states that Asian college candidates were preferred.

Many of those were Asian visa holders, which “lends itself to suppression of that workforce’s wages,” according to Labor. The reason is that visa holders depend on companies to authorize work in the U.S., allowing Oracle to underpay those workers.

The filing stated that the company “denies equal employment opportunity to non-Asian applicants for employment, strongly preferring a workforce that it can later underpay.” It added, “Once employed, women, blacks, and Asians are systematically underpaid relative to their peers.”

Black employees at the company, numbering only about 30, were severely underpaid, according to the filing. The pay disparity with white employees, said the department, was as high as 7.5 percent.

In 2017, Labor sued Oracle for pay discrimination. At that time, the department said the same thing: White employees were being paid more than people of color and that women were also underpaid. Oracle is now accused of not adopting reforms since that first complaint. At the time, Oracle said the accusations had no merit.

Photo: May Wonga/Flickr