California Hospital to Pay $975,000 To Settle National Origin Bias Charges

LOS ANGELES—A regional hospital in California’s Central Valley has agreed to pay $975,000 and implement sweeping changes to its policies in order to settle claims that it discriminated against and harassed some 70 Filipino American employees through the medical center’s alleged selective enforcement of an “English-only” language policy, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Sept. 17 (EEOC v. Central Calif. Found. for Health).

The $975,000 penalty would represent the largest settlement ever for a workplace language discrimination case on the West Coast, and the largest settlement of a language discrimination case anywhere in the U.S. healthcare industry, ...