Lockheed Martin agrees to pay $29.5 MILLION in settlement over anti-white discrimination

The two-part settlement will include $22 million paid to the US government to resolve allegations that Lockheed violated the False Claims Act, and $7.5 million paid directly to over 1,000 affected Lockheed employees.

Lockheed had been accused of falsely certifying compliance with a federal contract provision requiring contractors provide equal opportunity to employees and applicants for employment. The allegations spanned from 2019 to the present.

The company allegedly took race into account when making compensation decisions. Beginning in 2021, the company operated an incentive program called “Compensation Adder” or “Comp Adder” that awarded the top 20% of Lockheed’s employees a pay increase.

Managers had been instructed initially to use a merit-based performance criteria to award the incentive, however, “The United States alleged that prior to finalizing the Comp Adder selections, Lockheed performed a statistical analysis to ‘flag’ statistical outliers based on the race and sex composition of the Comp Adder list.”

“When a business group’s selections were flagged, human resource personnel were supposed to reach out to business group leaders and ask them to re-review their selections and the merit-based basis for the selections, without asking them to take any protected characteristic into account,” the press release stated.

The DOJ alleged that some HR personnel at Lockheed “exerted pressure on leaders in their business group to resolve race-related ‘flags’ by directing them to add or remove particular employees based on race.” Those personnel encouraged leaders to remove certain non-minority employees from the Comp Adder selections and replace them with minority employees.

The company was also accused of taking race or sex into account when making hiring decisions, making demographic goals a performance metric under a management compensation plan, and offering trainings, mentorship, and leadership programs to employees on the basis or race or sex.

Lockheed Martin denied the government’s allegations in a statement but said it “agreed to resolve this matter with the Department of Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to avoid the distraction and expense of prolonged litigation.”

“We did not admit liability, determining it would be best for all involved to put these matters behind us so we can remain focused on our critical national security mission,” the company said.