Dive Brief:

• The U.S. Commerce Department agreed this week to a $15 million settlement in a class action lawsuit that involves an estimated 450,000 African American and Latino people who may have been denied jobs because of the Census Bureau's unfair background check recruiting practices, according to media reports.
• Gearing up for the 2010 census, the bureau launched its employment effort. Temporary work as a census taker drew millions of applicants hoping to earn the $17.75 an hour the job paid.
• The complaint, filed in 2010, said the Census Bureau only gave applicants having criminal histories an unrealistic 30 days to provide paperwork explaining their record, according to attorneys representing the plaintiff class.

Dive Insight:

Adam Klein, lead attorney for the plaintiffs and the head of the class action practice group at Outten & Golden, said in a statement that getting that paperwork together was close to impossible for a large percentage of the rejected applicants.

“This settlement will require the Census Bureau to replace its arbitrary and racially discriminatory use of criminal records and develop a rational job-related method to determine whether an applicant has a criminal history which justifies his or her rejection from these essentially entry level jobs.”

The key to the settlement, Klein noted, is not the $15 million. Instead, he said, it is the "groundbreaking approach to designing a properly validated method of criminal history screening for the 2020 decennial census hiring that minimizes the impact on African Americans and Latinos."

Census will hire two experienced industrial organizational psychologists (one served as the plaintiffs’ expert during this case; Census will choose the other). Working together, the pair will be responsible for creating a hiring selection process that will greatly reduce the number of applicants refused employment based on prior connections to the criminal justice system.