NEW YORK – New evidence in a federal lawsuit allegedly shows the U.S. Census Bureau ignored a warning by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that its screening process for hiring more than one million temporary census workers could result in racial and ethnic discrimination.
A coalition of civil rights organizations filed an Amended Complaint in a class action lawsuit against the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Census Bureau’s parent agency, citing the EEOC’s warning along with other evidence in a case which seeks compensation for more than 100,000 minorities who were not selected for census work because of unprosecuted arrests and old, minor, and irrelevant convictions for offenses such as unlawful assembly and loitering.
The U.S. Justice Department, which is defending the Census Bureau, has its own regulations against use of arrest records where there has been no conviction, and against forcing job applicants to obtain official certification of no criminal record – the very devices the Census Bureau has used to screen out job applicants.
The original lawsuit commenced in April. The plaintiffs are seeking to create a national class of all those African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans illegally deprived of their opportunity to obtain census jobs.
The lawsuit claims the Census Bureau never made clear its procedure for selecting applicants and kept its hiring protocol a “closely guarded secret” for over a decade.
Applicants were subject to FBI background checks. If the FBI found an arrest in the applicant’s past, the applicant had just 30 days to produce the “official court documentation” showing disposition of the case if they wanted to remain eligible for employment, which resulted in about 90 percent of those with arrest records never pursuing applications.
The suit charges the Census Bureau with being reckless, if not intentional, in eliminating from this public service a larger percent of minority applicants than white applicants.
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