E&W Blog

The Trump administration’s Department of Labor (DOL) has spearheaded a positive agenda to free businesses from burdensome government overreach. So it came as welcome news when Secretary Scalia made the decision to drop an Obama-era DOL lawsuit against Oracle after an administrative law judge found that DOL did not establish any of its claims and recommended dismissal of the case. 
 
Unfortunately, a DOL regional solicitor, Janet Herold, who led the lawsuit which was filed in the last week of the Obama administration, accused Secretary Scalia of retaliation for resisting DOL’s attempts to settle the case. However, a recent letter from Labor Deputy Assistant Secretary Joe Wheeler tells a much different story and shows Ms. Herold’s motives for what they truly are, which go well beyond the appropriate scope of DOL authority.
 
ICYMI, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote a scathing piece on this egregious government overreach and the baseless claims of retaliation hurled at Secretary Scalia. The piece also serves to warn of the dangerous lawsuits we can expect under President-elect Biden’s DOL. 
 
Secrets of the Oracle Prosecution
By The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board
December 15, 2020
 
We’ve often criticized the Labor Department’s lawsuit launched in the waning days of the Obama Administration against Oracle for discriminating against women and minorities. But it turns out the prosecution was even worse than we thought—and there’s a lesson here about federal misuse of race and gender as enforcement cudgels.
 
The truth emerged this month in a letter from Labor Deputy Assistant Secretary Joe Wheeler to Congress responding to a whistleblower complaint by regional solicitor Janet Herold. Ms. Herold spearheaded the Oracle case, which Labor dropped recently after it was eviscerated in September by an administrative law judge…
 
In a memo to the Department’s Solicitor, she wrote that Oracle’s “real vulnerability” was that the trial would be public and detail how “Oracle and pretty much all tech companies are discriminating against women and Asians.” This would “damage [Oracle’s] reputation in the industry and hinder their ability to retain top talent” and “the most critical part of this enforcement action is the public airing and discussion of common industry pay practices which depress the wages of women and people of color.”
 
Wow. That sounds more like a vendetta than proper enforcement…
 
Mr. Scalia was naturally troubled by Ms. Herold’s excesses, and he informed her this summer that she would be reassigned to another job…
 
The silver lining of Oracle’s four-year saga is that the administrative law judge’s 278-page decision eviscerating Ms. Herold’s case will significantly limit Labor’s ability to bring similar paint-by-numbers complaints against businesses during a Biden Administration…
 
This is nasty stuff, and it shows how federal enforcers use race and gender as a reputational threat to bully companies into settling lawsuits even when they’re innocent. The real discrimination in this case was by the government, and kudos to Mr. Scalia for finally dropping it.
 
To read the full editorial by the Wall Street Journal, click here.