
Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions’ press release, the agency is urging employers to eliminate unnecessary broad background checks after discovering hundreds of applicants filing for racial discrimination charges. All of these resulted from the criminal background checks done by a beverage company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The EEOC recently found out that over 300 Africans-Americans are harshly affected by the Pepsi Beverages, formerly known as Pepsi Bottling Group. It occurred when the company conducted a criminal background policy check that disproportionately rejected black applicants for employment.
Under Pepsi’s former policy, applicants who have been arrested or convicted of certain minor offenses shall be denied employment. However, this contradicts the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where the use of arrest and conviction records to deny employment can be unlawful when it is not relevant for the job since it can limit the opportunities of the applicants or workers based on their race.
In the course of events, the said Beverage Company has agreed with the EEOC in modifying their policies thus adopting the new one. However, the aforementioned company is still required to pay all the monetary fines and other penalty charges set against them.
The EEOC Minneapolis Acting Director, Julie Schmid reminds employers that when conducting a background check, the nature and gravity of the offense of the applicant must be taken into consideration. More over the time that has passed since the conviction or completion of the sentence and the nature of the job in search must also be dealt with proper jurisdiction to make sure that job rejection is important for the particular position. She also added that such rejection can be considered as racial discrimination, a violation of the Title VII. In behalf of the EEOC, Acting Director Schmid hopes that employers with unnecessarily broad criminal background check policies would reassess their policies in order to comply with the provisions stated under Title VII.
The EEOC is expecting that employers would take note of their settlement agreement with Pepsi regarding on its strict qualifications in order to eliminate employment discrimination and establish equal employment opportunities for everyone.
In Pepsi’s case, the EEOC is grateful that Pepsi chooses to make an agreement in setting some real great changes without the need of further litigation. In some cases, employers usually oppose employment discrimination claims by trying to fabricate reasons for the employment action. Therefore, an employee filing for complaints must be sure that his or her lawyer is familiar with the tricks that employers do. Los Angeles Employment lawyers know very well on how to utilize their knowledge regarding laws when employment discrimination cases arises such as these.
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