Discrimination Lawsuit Against Amazon Claims the Company “De-Levels” Employees of Color
A Black woman who has worked at Amazon since 2017 is suing the online retailer and cloud services giant for racial discrimination, alleging the company purposely doesn’t promote employees of color and even pays them less than their White counterparts.
Lawyers representing Charlotte Newman said in the lawsuit filed Monday in Washington D.C., that Newman interviewed for a senior manager job at Amazon after obtaining a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard University. Newman was offered a role at Amazon Web Services that was one pay grade below the job she had interviewed for even though she was qualified for the senior manager job at the company’s cloud-services division, her lawsuit alleges. She took the job anyway and was then asked to perform senior manager duties, the lawsuit states.
Newman’s story isn’t unique at Amazon, her lawyers claim, citing other examples of the company “de-leveling” Black employees, or placing them in lower-level jobs that don’t match their experience and credentials.
