News and Announcements

PwC Strikes $12M Deal To End Job Applicants' Age Bias Suit

Mar 4, 2020 / News Item

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP has agreed to pay nearly $12 million to a group of unsuccessful job applicants to close the book on a California federal suit accusing the accounting firm of age discrimination. On Tuesday, named plaintiffs Steve Rabin and John Chapman asked U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar for preliminary approval of a deal in which PwC agreed to pay $11.6 million to resolve allegations that it violated the Age Discrimination in Employment Act by systematically favoring younger applicants and denying older candidates jobs that they were qualified to perform. Judge Tigar had...

Age Discrimination Class Action Settled, Announce PwC LLP, AARP Foundation, and Outten & Golden LLP

Mar 4, 2020 / Press Release

PricewaterhouseCoopers, AARP, AARP Foundation, and the law firm of Outten & Golden LLP are pleased to announce that the Plaintiffs and defendant PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP ("PwC") have reached a mutually consensual resolution of all claims in the class and collective action lawsuit Rabin v. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, pending in the Northern District of California. In the lawsuit, Plaintiffs alleged that PwC failed to hire them and the Class and Collective Action Members into Associate, Senior Associate, and Experienced Associate positions in the Tax and Assurance lines of service,...

PwC Applicants' Age Bias Collective Action Gets Green Light

Apr 8, 2019 / Media Coverage

A California federal judge has granted conditional collective action status to unsuccessful job applicants accusing PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP of bias against older candidates, saying the problems that led him to refuse to certify the collective in July had been fixed. U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar granted lead plaintiffs Steve Rabin and John Chapman's bid for conditional collective action certification on Friday, saying the plaintiffs had adequately narrowed the scope of the group they wanted to represent and noting that PwC would still have another chance to challenge it. Rabin and...

PwC Says Job Applicants Can't Sue For Age Discrimination

Jul 7, 2017 / Media Coverage

PricewaterhouseCoopers urged a California federal judge at a hearing Thursday to throw out a putative class action alleging the accounting firm doesn't consider older job applicants, arguing that disparate impact claims under federal age discrimination law can only be brought by existing employees, not prospective ones. * * * But Daniel B. Kohrman of AARP Foundation Litigation said the Gross decision worked in his favor, arguing that if you can’t take the language of one statute and apply it to another, then you can’t assume any meaning from the presence of “job applicants” in one statute and...

Lawsuit accuses PwC of discriminating against older job applicants

Jul 7, 2017 / Media Coverage

A lawsuit accusing PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP of violating U.S. discrimination law by hiring a "stunningly low" number of people over the age of 40 to maintain a youthful culture has been filed in San Francisco. The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court, said the London-based accounting company does virtually all of its recruiting for entry-level jobs on college campuses to stock its workforce with millenials. Federal law bars employers from discriminating against workers and job applicants who are 40 and older. The lawsuit was brought by Steve Rabin, 53, a certified public accountant...

Can A Job Rejection Be Age Discrimination?

May 10, 2017 / Media Coverage

If you’re an over-40 job hunter and not getting offers, you may be wondering if you’re being turned down due to your age. And, if so, whether that’s against the 50-year-old law, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. One pending class-action suit against Pricewaterhouse Coopers and another against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco (that the Supreme Court may soon hear) make this concern especially timely. There’s a good chance that age will hurt your job chances, especially if you’re in your 50s or older, based on a recent Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study. Researchers created realistic, but...

Older Workers Challenge Firms’ Aggressive Pursuit of the Young

Apr 16, 2017 / Media Coverage

In one class action against PricewaterhouseCoopers, two men say they were rejected because they lacked the youthful profile possessed by many PwC recruits PricewaterhouseCoopers bills itself as the “place to work for millennials,” who have taken jobs and internships with the accounting giant in droves. The firm annually recruits thousands of newly minted college graduates. The firm’s aggressive pursuit of youth is now the focus of a class-action suit, part of an emerging wave of litigation that is both testing the boundaries of age-discrimination liability and casting a legal cloud over...

Applicants Can Sue PricewaterhouseCoopers for Unintended Age Bias

Feb 27, 2017 / Media Coverage

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP must defend against claims by a proposed class of rejected 40-and-over job seekers, a federal judge in California ruled. The applicants say the accounting giant’s hiring and other employment practices inadvertently favor younger applicants and deter older ones ( Rabin v. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP , 2017 BL 49868, N.D. Cal., No. 16-cv-02276, 2/17/17 ). The decision rejects an opposing conclusion reached in October by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit but embraces the view of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It also signals a potential...

PwC Must Face Job Applicants' Age Discrimination Claims

Feb 21, 2017 / Media Coverage

PricewaterhouseCoopers on Friday was denied a bid to have a disparate impact claim under federal age discrimination law thrown out in a putative class action over age discrimination toward job applicants, with a California federal judge ruling a reading of U.S. Supreme Court precedent confirms job applicants may bring such claims. U.S. District Judge John S. Tigar denied a bid for judgment on the pleadings from PwC, which had argued that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act doesn’t permit job applicants to bring disparate impact claims. The judge wrote that a textual analysis of the...

PwC’s US firm faces age discrimination claim

Apr 29, 2016 / Media Coverage

The case has been brought in a California court by Steve Rabin, a 53-year-old certified public accountant, who is alleging violations of the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act. According to the complaint: ‘PwC's culture and practice has distributed the benefits of its enormous success unequally – systematically favouring younger applicants at the expense of their older counterparts.’ The lawsuit asserts that the number of workers 40 years of age and older in entry-level and lower to mid-level positions at PwC is ‘stunningly...

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