Business: Kaiser agrees to pay $11.5 million in discrimination case.

Health care consortium denies wrongdoing, expresses sadness over claims

Health care giant Kaiser Permanente has agreed to pay $11.5 million to settle claims going back 15 years that it illegally discriminated against thousands of Black employees — about half of them in the Bay Area — by denying them equal pay and promotions.

The 111-page settlement, which requires court approval, would resolve a class-action lawsuit claiming Kaiser’s alleged bias affected 2,225 Black workers in administrative support and consulting services in California.

One of the four named plaintiffs — two current employees and two former, all from Kaiser’s Oakland headquarters — alleged she took a demotion just to escape “blatant racism” in her department.

The class of workers would share $7.6 million, with the four plaintiffs receiving $60,000 to $75,000 each for bringing the case. Another roughly $3.5 milliion would go to legal fees. The deal announced Thursday by the plaintiffs’ law firm noted that Oakland-based Kaiser, a non-profit consortium with about 217,000 employees, denies wrongdoing.

“It is because of our commitment to equity and fairness that we have been especially saddened to learn that any employee would feel discriminated against at Kaiser Permanente,”

the health care consortium said Thursday in an emailed statement. “While various elements of the lawsuits are subject to dispute, we recognize the importance of listening to and learning from our employees.”

Kaiser’s statement also said it last year launched a multi-year program to combat bias, racism and social injustice.

The Black employees earned less than White employees performing similar work, and although Black workers received comparable performance evaluations to non-Black workers, they were not promoted in the same manner, according to the lawsuit. The suit was also filed

Thursday, but followed from a 2018 complaint to California’s equal-employment regulator.

Plaintiff Kenya Mayfield worked for Kaiser for more than 31 years, according to the suit. She had to wait “significantly longer” than two White women for a promotion to senior manager and was never promoted

to director, as her two White, female counterparts were, despite doing the work of a director for a year without the corresponding pay, the suit alleged.

“Ms. Mayfield accepted a demotion down to managerial consultant in June 2016 in order to escape a department plagued by blatant racism,” the suit alleged, adding that she never advanced back up to her previous position before she resigned four

years later. In her decades at Kaiser, she unsuccessfully applied for hundreds of positions.

Plaintiffs Shelby Stewart, Charleta Dabrowski and Benedict Johnson, all at Kaiser for about a decade and a half, said they did the work of higher-paid and higher-grade positions without the compensation or job titles and were passed over for promotion multiple times, with the roles given to white and non-Black employees, ac

cording to the suit. Dabrowski and Johnson remain employed at Kaiser, while Stewart resigned last year, according to the suit filed in San Francisco County Superior Court.

Affected workers’ shares of the settlement money would be based mainly on salary and length of employment. Kaiser would also have to hire an independent expert to analyze its pay practices. If the expert finds Black workers are underpaid, Kaiser would adjust compensation and pay back employees accordingly.

For the administrative support and consulting services job categories, Kaiser would also have to detail qualifications for jobs and promotions, train managers in using approved criteria for promotions and implement an equity and inclusion training program for managers.