Two people show up for a job opening; one is black, the other is white. The black is far better qualified. But the white lands the job. Is there something wrong here?
One way to find out is to use testers. They have been used for years to measure housing and banking discrimination, and now they may be used in the workplace, too.
A signal of the change came with the recent decision by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to hire two agencies to carry out pilot projects testing hiring bias. One is the Employment Discrimination Project run by the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago. The other is the Fair Employment Council in Washington, D.C.
The move is a novel one for the EEOC, which usually focuses on the cases that are brought to it by employees and applicants, and rarely goes on the offensive, ferreting out bias. The two agencies got the work because they are among the very few that do such work. The location of the testing has not been chosen yet.
Testing for hiring bias is much rarer, says LeeAnn Lodder, project manager for the Employment Discrimination Project, because of the nuances that go into hiring decisions and the difficulty of making a case. “You have to throw a lot more attention into selecting and pairing your testers,” explains Lodder, whose agency has been doing this work since 1990.
Since its testing work began, the agency has filed complaints with the EEOC against seven employers. Typically, it goes after firms that pay well for entry-level jobs but do not require much education, jobs often filled by minority workers, and often sought by people coming off welfare.
“What we are really testing is access,” Lodder explains.
In a recent case, for example, the agency sent white and black applicants to Guardian Security Services Inc. The whites, who were less qualified, were offered jobs. They turned them down. The blacks, meanwhile, did not receive any job offers, according to the agency. The black testers sued the company last week in federal court.
But Douglas Darch, an attorney for the Blue Island-based security firm, questions the complaints. “The company is 80 percent minority. The idea that they discriminate against minorities is ridiculous,” he says. Nor does Darch think much of the EEOC’s use of hiring testers.
“The EEOC has a backlog of close to 65,000 cases,” he says. “The idea that they need people to find additional discrimination when they can’t handle their own case load, this is manufactured discrimination.”
Contractors take cover: Millions of workers go through a legal dance daily on the job. They are independent contractors, and they–not the company that hires them–are responsible for their liabilities such as insurance coverage. But Chicago attorney Edward Margolis thinks a precedent has been set in an Illinois case that may affect workers statewide and across the nation.
The case involves Kim’s Trucking Inc. of Palos Heights and Wausau General Insurance Co. Wausau wanted the firm, which hauls construction materials, to pay workers compensation premiums for additional haulers it hired to get work done. But the company balked, saying it was not responsible.
The insurance company won in its case in Cook County Circuit Court and on the appeals level. An appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court was turned down last week. In the Appeals Court ruling, the judges said the trucking firm had several options: it could pay the insurance, show that the haulers have their own insurance, or show that they do not want the coverage.
What makes this case so important, explains Margolis, is that the policy the firm used is a standard across the United States. But Robert Diggs, an attorney for the American Trucking Association in suburban Washington, disagrees. His group felt that the issue was important enough to file a friend of the court brief in the case.
“We thought that the lower court got it wrong, and we hope that in the future cases, the courts get it right,” says Diggs. He also says the case may not have national significance, because it hinged on specific Illinois statues.
Multiple choice: The fact that supporters of Ron Carey, the disgraced head of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, won control again last week of Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago is significant because:
– The 17,000-member local is the union’s second largest.
– Chicago mostly belongs to Detroit lawyer James P. Hoffa, Carey’s foe and president-to-be if Carey loses his legal battle to run again for the job.
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– The union had an palace complex.
All of the above. Once upon a time, the union’s leaders liked to build palaces. They lined their Washington headquarters with marble. They built Local 705’s offices with the same palatial elegance in mind. Thus, winning control of the palace has some significance.