Are the Unemployed Victims of Discrimination?

Click here to read the article. From the WSJ, 11-25-11. By MICHAEL SALTSMAN, a research fellow at the Employment Policies Institute. Excerpts:

"This issue first bubbled up last year when the mobile phone company Sony Ericsson contracted with an Orlando-based job recruiter to hire employees for its new Atlanta headquarters. The recruiting firm added a caveat to one of the job posts: "No unemployed candidates will be considered at all."

After a series of news stories, a Sony Ericsson spokeswoman described the language in the job post as a "mistake" on the recruiter's part. The company wasn't trying to exclude the currently unemployed, she explained; rather, having already received an overwhelming number of applications from this group via its website, it was trying to expand the applicant pool to people who currently had a job."

"Missing from advocates' vague discussions of "numerous instances" and "emerging trends" was hard evidence to support the claim that the unemployed are being discriminated against. The closest thing to a data point came in a report released this summer by NELP, which identified 150 "exclusionary" ads during a one-month review of major job-search websites."

"NELP's sample, in other words, represents 0.005% of one month's job postings. Monster.com found a similar result, announcing this summer that "less than one one-hundredth of one percent of the postings on Monster had any language excluding the unemployed.""

"The lack of evidence for a nationwide epidemic is compounded by the fact that the NELP report took words out of context. For example, national recruiter Kelly Services placed the following ad in the St. Louis area: "Currently employed but lacking growth in terms of responsibilities and technical proficiencies? If so, Kelly IT Resources-St. Louis wants to talk to you!" NELP zeroed in on "currently employed," counted it as discriminatory, and ignored the rest of the posting."

"Common sense dictates that marketing to the currently employed looking to advance does not signal a rejection of the unemployed."