WASHINGTON (MCT) — as if finding work weren't hard enough already t a federal agency warns that some employers precludes unemployed workers from consideration for openings.
Practice has emerged 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 have been unemployed for longer than six months or a year.
Evidence of the practice have been mostly anecdotal, and information about how widespread it can be is lean.
But with unemployment rate of 9 percent and millions of people who are struggling to find jobs, practice has captured regulators, legislators and advocates for the unemployed attention.
' At a time when we should all do what we can open up job opportunities for unemployed, it is deeply disturbing that the trend conscious of excluding the unemployed from work opportunities are increasing, "said Christine Owens, Executive Director of the national employment law project.
Members of Congress contacted the Department of Labor and equal employment opportunity Commission last year to see if the practice violates federal employment laws against discrimination.
While unemployed not a protected class civil rights laws, the practice could be legally problematic, if it has a disparate or discriminatory effect on groups of job seekers, which is subject to civil rights protections.
In a public meeting Wednesday in EEOC headquarters, testified several witnesses, to exclude the unemployed from the job openings disproportionately to affect African-Americans, Hispanics, disabled people and older workers — all federally protected groups if jobless rates are well above the average for the U.S..
Blacks and Hispanics are particularly vulnerable, said William Spriggs, Labor Department assistant secretary for policy, because they represent a large proportion of the unemployed workers and a small part of them with jobs.
"When employers to exclude the unemployed from the applicant pool, they are more inclined to exclusive Latinos and African-Americans," Spriggs testified about.
Most seem to agree that the overwhelming majority of job postings do not contain such language. James Urban, a partner at Jones day law firm in Pittsburgh who advises large employers, testified that he never dealt with an employer who would hire the unemployed.
Listings, which exclude the unemployed candidates would violate the terms of use policies against discrimination on Monster.com, who posted hundreds of thousands of job vacancies.
"We would flag, as a violation of our policy," company spokesman Matthew Henson said. He said homepage screened listings to such problems.
Spriggs said the problem still occur behind closed doors, without explicit language. It is because employers are looking for ways to cut through the large number of applications quickly. On average, said, there are nine job applicants for each two openings, he.
Other suggested practice reflect a bias that workers who were made redundant is not the most talented.
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 was often asked to recruit people from competition rather than qualified unemployed candidates. She said workers with disabilities had an even tougher job search due to this avoidance of unemployed candidates.
While the jobless applicants did not say may have "skills, which are obsolete or outdated" compared with the worker candidates, screening them out is effective because it limits the pool of qualified workers, Fernan Cepero, State Director for New York State Society for Human Resource Management. He said practice probably wasn ' t widespread because "involved stakes too high for that".
But Owens national employment law project, said his group routinely heard from older workers, had been rejected remuneration, because they were not employed.
A 53-year-old Illinois woman who was dismissed after 19 years as an information technology supervisor said a Recruiter would send her on a job interview when he realized she had not worked for a year.
A 44-year-old woman lost out on a pharmaceutical sales position because the job demanded that she currently be employed in the industry or have left it within a period of six months.
Owens said that during the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the age discrimination in employment Act of 1967, it was illegal for employers to use practices that "restrict interchangeability or classify" individuals in ways that are limited or denied employment based on race, sex, color, religion, Ethnicity, or age. Practice, there appears to be non-discriminatory could violate these laws, if they have a disparate impact on members of these protected classes.
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