<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" ><tr><td valign="top" style="font: inherit;"><DIV>This could be illegal because if someone is unemployed because they are disabled, or another minority, they are extending and practicing the same discrimination against that person. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>Donovan Arnold<BR><BR>--- On <B>Thu, 2/17/11, Art Deco <I><deco@moscow.com></I></B> wrote:<BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE style="BORDER-LEFT: rgb(16,16,255) 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"><BR>From: Art Deco <deco@moscow.com><BR>Subject: [Vision2020] Anyone can find a job<BR>To: "Vision 2020" <vision2020@moscow.com><BR>Date: Thursday, February 17, 2011, 10:55 AM<BR><BR>
<DIV id=yiv659965736>
<STYLE></STYLE>
<DIV><FONT size=2><SPAN class=yiv659965736maintitle><B><FONT size=5>Unemployed need not apply, some companies saying</FONT></B></SPAN>
<DIV><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody><B>By Tony Pugh</B></SPAN><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody> <BR><BR>McClatchy</SPAN><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody> <BR><BR>WASHINGTON – As if finding work weren’t hard enough already, a federal agency warns that some employers are excluding jobless workers from consideration</SPAN><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody> for openings.</SPAN><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody> The practice has surfaced in electronic and print postings with language such as “unemployed applicants will not be considered” or “must be currently employed.” Some ads use time thresholds to exclude applicants who’ve been unemployed longer than six months or a year.<BR><BR>Evidence of the practice has been mostly anecdotal, and information about how widespread it may be is sketchy.</SPAN><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody> <BR><BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV id=yiv659965736continuationAfter><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>But with unemployment at 9 percent and millions of people struggling to find jobs, the practice has caught the attention of regulators, lawmakers and advocates for the unemployed. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>“At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise,” said Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Members of Congress contacted the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year to see whether the practice violates federal employment laws against discrimination. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>While the unemployed <SPAN>aren</SPAN>’t a protected class under civil
rights laws, the practice could be legally problematic if it has a disparate or discriminatory effect on groups of job seekers who are subject to civil rights protections. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>In a public meeting Wednesday at EEOC headquarters, several witnesses testified that excluding the unemployed from job openings could disproportionately affect African-Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities and older workers – all federally protected groups whose jobless rates are well above the U.S. average. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Blacks and Hispanics are particularly vulnerable, said William Spriggs, the Labor Department’s assistant secretary for policy, because they represent a large share of unemployed workers and a smaller portion of those with jobs. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>“When employers exclude the unemployed from the applicant pool, they are more likely to be excluding
Latinos and African- Americans,” Spriggs testified. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Several examples of discriminatory help-wanted ads were offered: a Texas electronics company said online that it would “not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason”; an ad for a restaurant manager position in New Jersey said applicants must be employed; a phone manufacturer’s job announcement said “No Unemployed Candidates Will Be Considered At All,” according to Helen Norton, associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Law. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Most seem to agree that the overwhelming majority of job postings don’t contain such language. James Urban, a partner at Jones Day law firm in Pittsburgh who counsels large employers, testified that he’s never dealt with an employer who wouldn’t hire the jobless. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Listings that exclude
unemployed applicants would violate terms-of-use policies against discrimination at Monster.com, which posts hundreds of thousands of job openings. “We would flag that as a violation of our policy,” company spokesman Matthew Henson said. He said the website screened listings for such problems. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Spriggs said the problem might still occur behind closed doors, without the explicit language. That’s because employers are looking for ways to cut through large numbers of applications quickly. On average, there are nine job applicants for every two openings, he said. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Others suggested the practice reflects a bias that workers who were laid off aren’t the most talented. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Joyce Bender, the CEO of Bender Consulting Services and an advocate for people with disabilities, testified that when she worked as a job recruiter, she
often was asked to hire people from the competition rather than qualified unemployed applicants. She said workers with disabilities were having an even tougher job search because of this avoidance. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>While jobless applicants might have “skills that are stale or obsolete” compared with employed candidates, screening them out isn’t effective because it limits the pool of qualified workers, said Fernan Cepero, the state director of the New York State Society for Human Resource Management. He said the practice probably wasn’t widespread because “the stakes involved are too high for that.” </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>But Owens of the National Employment Law Project said her group routinely heard from older workers who’d been rejected for consideration because they weren’t employed. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>A 53-year-old Illinois woman who was laid off after 19
years as an information technology supervisor said a recruiter wouldn’t send her on a job interview when he realized she hadn’t worked for a year. A 44-year-old woman lost out on a pharmaceutical sales position because the job required that she be currently employed in the industry or have left it within six months. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody>Owens said that under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, it was illegal for employers to use practices that “limit, segregate or classify” individuals in ways that limited or denied employment opportunities based on race, gender, color, religion, ethnicity or age. </SPAN><BR><BR><SPAN class=yiv659965736abody><SPAN style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Tribune Washington bureau contributed to this report.</SPAN> </SPAN></DIV></FONT></DIV></DIV><BR>-----Inline Attachment Follows-----<BR><BR>
<DIV class=plainMail>=======================================================<BR>List services made available by First Step Internet, <BR>serving the communities of the Palouse since 1994. <BR> <A href="http://www.fsr.net/" target=_blank>http://www.fsr.net</A> <BR> mailto:<A href="http://us.mc381.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=Vision2020@moscow.com" ymailto="mailto:Vision2020@moscow.com">Vision2020@moscow.com</A><BR>=======================================================</DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></td></tr></table><br>