[HN Gopher] Notice of collective action lawsuit against Workday,...
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Notice of collective action lawsuit against Workday, Inc.
Author : mooreds
Score : 92 points
Date : 2026-01-26 18:37 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (workdaycase.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (workdaycase.com)
| parliament32 wrote:
| > allegations include that Workday, Inc., through its use of
| certain Artificial Intelligence ("AI") features on its job
| application platform, violated the Age Discrimination in
| Employment Act ("ADEA")
|
| I'm interested to see Workday's defense in this case. Will it be
| "we can't be held liable for our AI", and will it work against a
| law as "strong" as ADEA?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Hopefully they have something better prepared because "we can't
| be held liable for the black box we made" doesn't sound like a
| recipe for success. In Canada, they've already ruled that a
| website operator is liable for information that their LLM
| chatbot gives out.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
| edoceo wrote:
| Key part is that AI is suspected of down-ranking folks by age
| (ADEA = Age Discrimination in Employment Act)
|
| > The Court has provisionally certified an ADEA collective, which
| includes: "All individuals aged 40 and over who, from September
| 24, 2020, through the present, applied for job opportunities
| using Workday, Inc.'s job application platform and were denied
| employment recommendations." In this context, being "denied" an
| "employment recommendation" means that (i) the individual's
| application was scored, sorted, ranked, or screened by Workday's
| AI; (ii) the result of the AI scoring, sorting, ranking, or
| screening was not a recommendation to hire; and (iii) that result
| was communicated to the prospective employer, or the result was
| an automatic rejection by Workday.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Age discrimination is a huge issue and I've experienced it
| firsthand. Places want to hire younger people because they're
| more apt to work longer hours for less pay. It's going to get
| worse as people who got into the web tech industry early on are
| still in the workforce, yet more and more young people are
| entering the workforce because "learning to code" was the
| perceived path to prosperity half a decade ago.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| > Places want to hire younger people because they're more apt
| to work longer hours for less pay.
|
| This is the _best_ light you can shine on the discrimination.
| Most often it really is managers taking their "seniority"
| literally. As in, they don't want to take the risk their
| reports are smarter, more experienced or capable of replacing
| them, so they discriminate on the basis of age. It's
| counterintuitive, but this feels truest from my historical
| observation.
| rtp4me wrote:
| I wonder if this is really true or just an off-the-cuff
| comment (no disrespect). I have worked for a number of major
| tech companies and have never seen this in practice. Some
| managers were older, some were younger, some the same age. In
| most/all cases, people were hired based on their technical
| skills not because they fell into some magical age gap.
| eightys3v3n wrote:
| I've experienced the opposite where some smaller companies
| won't even look at a resume for someone under 30. One of the
| owners admitted it to me later on. :(
| boscillator wrote:
| It will be fascinating to see the facts of this case, but if it
| is proven their algorithms are discriminatory, even by accident,
| I hope workday is held accountable. Making sure your AI doesn't
| violate obvious discrimination laws should be basic engineering
| practice, and the courts should help remind people of that.
| zugi wrote:
| An AI class that I took decades ago had just a 1 day session on
| "AI ethics". Somehow despite being short, it was memorable (or
| maybe _because_ it was short...)
|
| They said ethics demand that any AI that is going to pass
| judgment on humans must be able to explain its reasoning. _An
| if-then rule says this_ , or even _a statistical correlation
| between A and B indicates that_ would be fine. Fundamental
| fairness requires that if an automated system denies you a
| loan, a house, or a job, it be able to explain something you
| can challenge, fix, or at least understand.
|
| LLMs _may_ be able to provide that, but it would have to be
| carefully built into the system.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I'm sure you could get an LLM to create a plausible sounding
| justification for every decision? It might not be related to
| the real reason, but coming up with text isn't the hard part
| there surely
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| It sounds like you're saying we should generate more
| bullshit to justify bullshit.
| teraflop wrote:
| They said "could", not "should".
|
| I believe the point is that it's much easier to create a
| _plausible_ justification than an _accurate_
| justification. So simply requiring that the system
| produce some kind of explanation doesn 't help, unless
| there are rigorous controls to make sure it's accurate.
| nullc wrote:
| Yes, they will, they'll rationalize whatever. This is most
| obvious w/ transcript editing where you make the LLM 'say'
| things it wouldn't say and then ask it why.
| zugi wrote:
| > I'm sure you could get an LLM to create a _plausible
| sounding_ justification for every decision.
|
| That's a great point: funny, sad, and true.
|
| My AI class predated LLMs. The implicit assumption was that
| the explanation had to be correct and verifiable, which may
| not be achievable with LLMs.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| This is the law in the EU, I think
| em-bee wrote:
| the way i understand it is that the law says decisions must
| be reviewed by a human (and i am guessing should also be
| overrideable), but this still leaves the question how the
| review is done and what information the human has to make
| the review.
| rilindo wrote:
| > Fundamental fairness requires that if an automated system
| denies you a loan, a house, or a job, it be able to explain
| something you can challenge, fix, or at least understand.
|
| That could get interesting, as most companies will not
| provide feedback if you are denied employment.
| zugi wrote:
| Fair point. Maybe the requirement should be that the
| automated system provide an explanation that _some human_
| could review for fairness and correctness. While who
| receives the explanation may be a separate question, the
| drawback of LLMs judging people is that said explanation
| may not even exist.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Would love to see some of the liability transfer to the
| companies using Workday too...
| phonon wrote:
| https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66831340/mobley-v-workd...
| mh- wrote:
| As someone over 40, I couldn't help but laugh at the font size on
| the site.. I guess they know their audience.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The first HN link I visited in a long time where I didn't have
| to hit ctrl-+ 3 or more times to increase the font size and
| make it readable.
| mh- wrote:
| lol, exactly my response. I have HN itself at 150% (ctrl-+
| 3x).
| davio wrote:
| Regardless of merit, this seems like appropriate payback for
| having to make a new workday account for every single company you
| apply to a job.
| jkhall81 wrote:
| Oh snap.
| akersten wrote:
| Feel bad for the next guy who wants to sue them but has to settle
| for workdaycase2 .com
|
| I never liked these "trust me bro we're court authorized, give us
| all your PII to join the class action" setups on random domains.
| Makes phishing seem inevitable. Why can't we have a .gov that
| hosts all these as subdomains?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, that's always my first reaction as well.
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