Cloudera faces DOJ lawsuit over alleged US worker discrimination

The US Department of Justice is going after Cloudera, and the allegations are damning. The data and AI platform company allegedly rigged a federal hiring program so thoroughly that American job seekers never stood a chance, literally.

Filed Tuesday with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the lawsuit pins multiple violations of the Immigration and Nationality Act on Cloudera, claiming the company systematically favored foreign workers holding temporary visas over domestic candidates for at least seven positions throughout 2024 and into 2025.

The whole controversy revolves around something called PERM, the Department of Labor’s permanent labor certification program. In plain terms, it is a legal pathway companies use to help temporary visa holders eventually obtain permanent residency. But the process comes with strict conditions. Before any employer can claim no qualified American is available for a role, they must run a genuine, documented recruitment effort, track every applicant, and provide legitimate job-related reasons for any rejections.

Cloudera allegedly took a different route and quietly built a parallel hiring lane reserved strictly for those PERM-related openings. Rather than directing applicants to its standard portal, the company reportedly told US candidates to send resumes to a specific email address. That address, according to federal investigators, was completely non-functional. Resumes went nowhere. Nobody received them. No records existed.

Armed with that clean slate, Cloudera then reportedly turned around and told the Department of Labor, repeatedly, that it had searched and found zero qualified American workers. The DOJ is calling that a calculated deception, not a clerical error, and the nearly year-long duration of the alleged conduct only deepens that accusation.

Penalties could include civil fines, back wages with interest owed to affected workers, and a court injunction forcing the company to clean up its practices.

The case draws unavoidable comparisons to Apple’s 2023 settlement over strikingly similar PERM violations, which cost the tech giant $25 million. Critics at the time noted that figure was barely a rounding error for a company of Apple’s size. Investors took Cloudera private in 2021, and the company, which now employs roughly 3,200 people, has not said a word since the suit dropped.