Truthout recently reported on a most disturbing trend: job openings not open to the currently unemployed. (Translation: a job one can’t get unless one already has a job.)
The real kicker, as the story goes on to report, is that the unemployed are currently not a protected class under current discrimination laws, at least not directly:
While the unemployed aren’t a protected class under civil rights laws, the practice could be legally problematic if it has a disparate or discriminatory effect on groups of job seekers who are subject to civil rights protections.
In a public meeting Wednesday at EEOC headquarters, several witnesses testified that excluding the unemployed from job openings could disproportionately affect African-Americans, Hispanics, people with disabilities and older workers — all federally protected groups whose jobless rates are well above the U.S. average.
So we can at least hold out hope that this is considered discrimination, albeit in a very backdoor fashion.
It shouldn’t come to that, though. It is a very unfortunate oversight that, until now, the possibility of discriminating against the unemployed has been overlooked as something that needs to be protected against. And for most of the last five decades, we haven’t needed to write that into the law books.
But, alas, it appears now we do. This is a new low for corporations, and to be honest, I’m not even sure what such an arbitrary exclusion is supposed to actually accomplish. Regardless, whatever companies are doing this (the Truthout story is unfortunately lacking names) should be ashamed of themselves.