Workday is facing a bid to turn a closely watched employment discrimination lawsuit over its artificial intelligence hiring tools into a class action covering applicants who allege they were disadvantaged because of race, sex, age or disability.
Plaintiffs in Mobley v. Workday Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00770-RFL, have asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to certify four proposed subclasses covering African American applicants, women, people aged over 40 and applicants with disabilities who were subjected to the challenged screening process. U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin has scheduled a class-certification hearing for 9 March 2027.
The litigation began in 2023 with Derek Mobley, a Black man over 40 who has anxiety and depression. Mobley alleges that he applied for more than 100 jobs through employers using Workday’s platform and was repeatedly rejected, often within hours of applying. Jill E. Hughes, Sheilah Johnson-Rocha and FaithLinh Rowe have since joined him as representative plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs allege that Workday’s EU AI Act Draft Guidelines Clarify High-Risk AI System Classification can produce disparate outcomes even when operating as designed. They contend that elements of the technology use historical workforce data and can score, rank, screen or reject applicants in ways that disproportionately disadvantage protected groups. Workday denies that its technology discriminates and says its AI tools assess job qualifications rather than protected characteristics such as race, age or disability.
The case has already produced a significant ruling on the AI at Work: Who Is Liable When It Goes Wrong? under employment law. In 2024, Lin held that Mobley had plausibly alleged that Workday could act as an agent of employers where customers delegate traditional hiring functions to its technology. That allowed EEOC and DOJ Shift Title VII Enforcement | Lawyer Monthly under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act to proceed. The court did not find that discrimination had occurred and rejected claims alleging intentional discrimination.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed an amicus brief supporting the proposition that a software vendor can fall within federal employment-discrimination laws where an employer gives it authority to perform functions on the employer’s behalf. The EEOC did not take a position on whether Mobley’s allegations were factually established or whether Workday was ultimately liable.
A narrower age-discrimination claim has already advanced through a separate collective-action procedure. In May 2025, Lin granted preliminary certification under the ADEA for applicants aged 40 and over whose applications were allegedly scored, sorted, ranked or screened by Workday’s AI and did not result in a recommendation to hire. The court later confirmed that certain applicants screened using HiredScore AI features could fall within that collective.
The new class-certification request is broader. The plaintiffs say evidence from a Workday witness shows that more than 356 million applications passed through Workday Recruiting in 2024 and that more than 27 million job offers were made. Workday says around two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies use its products. Those figures do not establish how many applicants were affected by any alleged discrimination, but they illustrate the scale of the technology involved.
One central issue will be whether applicants dealing with different employers and applying for different jobs have sufficiently common claims to justify class treatment. Steven Nevolis of Thompson Hine, who is not involved in the case, told Reuters that commonality could be a significant hurdle. Gerald Maatman of Duane Morris said the litigation could provide a framework for future claims involving both AI vendors and employers using their systems.
Winston Cooks and Wiggins Childs Pantazis Fisher & Goldfarb are among the firms representing the plaintiffs, while Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe represents Workday. No finding has been made that Workday’s technology discriminates against applicants, and the company continues to contest the claims.