As if finding work weren't hard enough already, a federal agency warns that some employers are excluding jobless workers from consideration for openings.
The practice has surfaced in electronic and print postings with language such as "unemployed applicants will not be considered" or "must be currently employed." Some ads use time thresholds to exclude applicants who've been unemployed longer than six months or a year.
Evidence of the practice has been mostly anecdotal, and information about how widespread it may be is sketchy.
But with unemployment at 9 percent and millions of people struggling to find jobs, the practice has caught the attention of regulators, lawmakers and advocates for the unemployed.
"At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise," said Christine Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project.
Members of Congress contacted the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last year to see whether the practice violates federal employment laws.
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.
Blacks and Hispanics are particularly vulnerable, said William Spriggs, the Labor Department's assistant secretary for policy, because they represent a large share of unemployed workers.
"When employers exclude the unemployed from the applicant pool, they are more likely to be excluding Latinos and African-Americans," Spriggs testified.
Most seem to agree that the overwhelming majority of job postings don't contain such language.
Listings that exclude unemployed applicants would violate policies against discrimination at Monster.com, which posts hundreds of thousands of jobs.
"We would flag that as a violation of our policy," company spokesman Matthew Henson said. He said the website screened listings for such problems.
Spriggs said the problem might still occur behind closed doors, without the explicit language. That's because employers are looking for ways to cut through large numbers of applications quickly. On average, there are nine job applicants for every two openings, he said.
