Target has agreed to reform its employment screening practices as part of a settlement resolving Equal Employment Opportunity Office complaints dating to 2006 and a potential class action suit. The agreement’s still subject to judicial approval.
Target agreed on Thursday to revise guidelines for how it screens people seeking jobs at its stores, a step meant to quell complaints that the retailer discriminates against black and Hispanic applicants with criminal records that can include offenses too minor or old to affect their performance as employees.
The EEOC complaints originated with Target’s treatment of Carnella Times, who applied to be an overnight stocker at a Connecticut Target.
[Times] said she had told Target interviewers that she had a misdemeanor conviction from 1996, when she was in her mid-20s. After several interviews, she said, she received what Target called a conditional job offer contingent on the results of a criminal-background check.
Later, she received a letter from Target with a copy of a background report showing she had two misdemeanor convictions from 1996, and she was eventually told that she would not be hired, according to court papers.
The class action was filed by lawyers for Times and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Fortune Society, which advocates for former prisoners, as well as a second would-be Target employee, Erving Smith.
[Smith] said he had applied for a job as a stocker at a Target store in Pittsburgh in 2014. He told interviewers that he had been convicted 10 years earlier of a drug-related felony, but received a conditional job offer.
Mr. Smith said a store manager called later to tell him that the offer was being rescinded because of the results of a background check, according to the suit.
Target’s hiring scheme was compounding extant racial and ethnic socioeconomic disparities. These begin before the criminal justice system, but our justice system amplifies and entrenches them.
African-Americans and Hispanics are arrested and convicted at rates more than double those of whites, according to the suit, which said Target’s hiring process “systematically” eliminated thousands of qualified applicants regardless of their potential to be good employees by requiring the automatic rejection of people convicted of offenses that could include violence, theft, fraud or drugs within the seven years of their applications.
The policy, the suit said, “imported acute racial and ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system into the employment process, thereby multiplying the negative impact on African-American and Latino job applicants.”
This is one of a suite of suits that should prompt other retailers to review their own hiring processes. Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Amazon have faced or are facing similar complaints.
Last year, the Fortune Society filed complaints with the E.E.O.C. against Macy’s Inc., and a subsidiary, Bloomingdale’s, accusing them of refusing to hire or retain people with criminal histories. A group of former Amazon delivery drivers in Massachusetts filed similar complaints, saying they had been unfairly fired because of an overly strict background check policy that disproportionately disqualified black and Hispanic workers, according to an article in The Boston Globe.
The cost of failing to eliminate discrimination can be high. In addition to what will no doubt be an expensive policy review and rehaul, the settlement also requires Target take proactive measures to ameliorate its prior bad practices.
As part of the proposed settlement of the suit, Target agreed to institute a priority hiring process so that certain people who had been turned away could get jobs. Others who are retired, already employed or otherwise unable to benefit from a job would be eligible for awards of up to $1,000 apiece from the settlement fund, to which the company agreed to contribute $3.7 million.
This makes the second time in the past three years that Target has settled following complaints of discriminatory hiring practices.
[T]he EEOC found reasonable cause to believe that three employment assessments formerly used by Target disproportionately screened out applicants for positions based on race and sex. … [T]he assessments disproportionately screened out black, Asian, and female applicants. “The tests were not sufficiently job-related and consistent with business necessity, and thus violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” the EEOC said.
The EEOC also dinged Target for its failure to adhere to the Americans With Disabilities Act. One of its pre-hire assessments involved questions that were asked and interpreted by psychologists .... The ADA, which turned 25 this year, says that an employer can conduct a medical examination only after making a job offer, and even then, only if it requires the assessment of all workers applying for jobs in that category.
The EEOC also found that Target had failed to maintain required records to properly assess the impact of its hiring procedures.
The investigation found that thousands of applicants were affected. Target agreed to pay out $2.8 million, update its data collection systems, and monitor hiring tests—as well as submitting the tests to the EEOC to evaluate.
NB: You’re not out of the woods if you do get hired by Target. They’ve also been sued for widespread mistreatment of employees, notably shaming employees accused of theft by handcuffing them and walking them through the store.