Dive Brief:
- Reuters reports that dozens of companies using recruiting websites violated New York City laws by refusing to hire anyone with a felony record, affecting mostly African-Americans. The result is a recent lawsuit filed by the NAACP.
- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued a class of companies it said were breaking city and state laws that bar businesses from refusing to consider former convicts for jobs, Reuters reports. The lawsuit was filed in state court in Manhattan.
- Since New York's prison population was more than half black, the lawsuit argued, such policies served to keep many black people out of the workforce. The NAACP said in the complaint that it intended to add more defendants.
Dive Insight:
Reuters reports that of the five employers named in the suit so far (electronics giant Koninklijke Philips NV, pest control company Advance Tech, Australian data management company Recall Holdings Ltd, and IT consulting company NTT Data), the NAACP lawsuit cites Philips as a prime example of crossing the line.
On the job site tweetmyjobs.com, Philips posted an ad seeking a network engineer with "zero felony convictions." Job-posting sites named in the lawsuit were Monster, ZipRecruiter and Indeed.
Coming on the heels of the national "Ban the Box" movement (taking criminal history checkboxes out of job applications), this litigation comes as no surprise. Employers have many ways to determine whether someone with a criminal record is a possible fit, as the Ban the Box proponents have said.
