August 10, 2006 12:38 PM
Questions Arise of Possible Bias at Drug Maker
Excerpt: According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, the percentage of Johnson & Johnson senior executives who were African-American or Hispanic actually fell in the years before the lawsuit was filed.
At Johnson & Johnson, the director of equal opportunity was worried. The company, she warned in a memo written in the late 1990's - the exact date is unclear - had "areas of vulnerability" to employment discrimination lawsuits.
As it turned out, she was right. And the memo, written by Marion HochbergSmith and intended to prod Johnson & Johnson, the giant drug company, into making improvements, could now end up serving as an unintended legal weapon against it.
That memo, along with other documents submitted to a federal court in New Jersey, emerged publicly yesterday in support of a motion to certify a lawsuit filed in 2001 by several African-American and Hispanic employees as a class action. The documents open a rare window into the workings of a big company coping with how to hire and promote fairly.
In the memo, Ms. HochbergSmith expressed concerns about inadequate tracking of promotions, reports of unequal salaries and insufficient outreach to recruit women and minorities. Possibly in response to her recommendations, the drug maker formed a diversity task force, but few of the proposals, executives later conceded in legal depositions, ended up being put into practice.
A company spokesman, Marc Monseau, emphasized that the criticism in the memo should be considered in the larger context of continual self-examination at Johnson & Johnson.
"We engage in critical self-analysis because we are always looking to improve our processes and our performance," Mr. Monseau said. "That reaches to all aspects of our business, including diversity."
The company, he added, would continue to defend itself against the plaintiffs' accusations, which it considers groundless.
The suit does not claim that the company simply refused to hire the employees who are the plaintiffs, but that executives knew years ago that they were missing their targets for promoting such employees - and did little to solve the problem.
The employees who sued (some have since left the company) claimed that they were unfairly passed over for promotions and that they unfairly received lower pay and smaller bonuses than their white colleagues. They also contended that they were hired into positions earning less than their experience and education justified, and that they were steered into less prestigious business lines at the company.
The kind of information disclosed in this case does not often become public, employment lawyers say, because most companies settle discrimination suits before they reach the class certification stage. One reason settlements are attractive, of course, is to keep potentially embarrassing information confidential.
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