Here’s a link to the press release from Harmeet Dhillon, the attorney representing the plaintiffs: https://www.dhillonlaw.com/lawsuits/google-discrimination/

The ruling itself: https://www.dhillonlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Google-Employee-Discrimination-Class-Action-Ruling.pdf

An initial plaintiff in the litigation was James Damore, probably the best known (former) employee of Google fired for daring to dissent from progressive orthodoxy. Last fall, Mr. Damore and another plaintiff agreed to private arbitration and dropped out of the case. It continues with the remaining plaintiffs.

Plaintiffs have overcome only an initial hurdle, and still have a bunch more they need to jump. Excerpts from the ruling are below.

Google contends that the Political Subclass is not ascertainable because plaintiffs plead no objective criteria to identify applicants who engaged in “conservative” activity; they allege no rule, regulation, policy, or practice common to the class and thus no community of interest; and the class proceedings they propose are not manageable because such proceedings would require extensive inquiry into millions of applicants’ public and application information.

The Court indeed has doubts regarding the viability of the putative Political Subclass claims on each of these grounds. However, it is not prepared to find at the pleading stage that there is “no reasonable possibility that the requirements for class certification will be satisfied” as to these claims. […]

Google contends that class discovery on the Political Subclass will be unmanageable. It points to practical issues with regard to identifying members of the putative class that are real and may well prove insurmountable for plaintiffs. Still, for the reasons already discussed, the Court will not bar plaintiffs from attempting to prove that a class can be certified on the novel theory they allege. Notably, many of the sources of information that Google contends cannot be manageably searched, such as historical social media data and other public platforms, are likely not within Google’s possession, custody, or control in the first place; others, such as applications, resumes, and applicants’ communications with Google, are equally relevant to the putative class claims alleging race and gender discrimination. For these reasons, it is unlikely that leaving the putative Political Subclass in the mix will dramatically impact class discovery. […]

Ultimately, it will be plaintiffs’ burden to show that certification of the Political Subclass is appropriate. The Court anticipates that this will not be an easy burden to satisfy; however, the pleadings do not establish that there is no reasonable possibility it can be met.

In related news yesterday, a (lefty anti-Trump, anti-GOP, anti-Breitbart, etc.) Google employee who co-organized a recent employee walkout has quit. Unlike James Damore, this now-former Google employee, Claire Stapleton, was not fired: her departure was voluntary. It comes after management awarded her and her team a “Culture Award” for organizing the walkout. Here’s management’s statement about her departure:

“To reiterate, we don’t tolerate retaliation. Our employee relations team did a thorough investigation of her claims and found no evidence of retaliation. They found that Claire’s management team supported her contributions to our workplace, including awarding her their team Culture Award for her role in the Walkout.”

Here’s Ms. Stapleton’s Medium post describing why she quit: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/why-a-googlewalkout-organizer-left-google-26d1e3fbe317

Testing comment post on the Mercury News thread before attempted merge to prior thread (about same court opinion).