What are the legal implications if the person in charge of a department sends out an internal email with a list of available jobs but includes the message in the thread title?
[ul]
[li]Is this legal?[/li][li]If not, who can sue? (I assume only someone who applied and was turned down for a job, and uses the email as evidence of race/gender-based hostility. Is this correct?)[/li][li]Can/would the DOJ Civil Rights division or DOL have a role here?[/li][li]Would there be implications for the sender of the email? The organization? The people who send it out selectively based on those instructions?[/li][/ul]
[quote=Fotheringay-Phipps]
[li]Is this legal?[/li][/quote]
IANAL, but I’d say it violates laws that prohibit discriminating against protected classes. In this case, “white” and “male” are two protected classes, and they are being discriminated against in this case by restricting the distribution of the list of job openings so as to deny them the opportunity to apply.
[quote=Fotheringay-Phipps]
[li]If not, who can sue? (I assume only someone who applied and was turned down for a job, and uses the email as evidence of race/gender-based hostility. Is this correct?)[/li][/quote]
People can’t even apply if they aren’t informed of openings. IANAL, but I would say that pretty much any white male could sue as soon as the job openings were filled (thereby denying him any opportunity to even apply).
Technically anyone can sue for anything. But my assumption was that it would be very hard for a plaintiff to show that they personally were harmed by the email if they never applied, even if that’s only because they never heard about it to begin with. (How would you establish that you would have heard about it, would have applied, and would have been hired, absent that attitude?)
No, cisgendered people are everyone who isn’t transgendered. They are geometric isomers of each other. (Okay, maybe not on that last part, but that’s what I always think of when I hear the prefixes.)
It depends on what state you’re in. Discriminating on the basis of ‘male’ and ‘white’ are both illegal across the US. In more conservative states, there’s no protection for discriminating on cis/trans status or sexual orientation.
For the federally protected classes (white and male) you’d probably file an EEOC lawsuit, for the others you’d file one with whoever handles it in your state. IANAL so I don’t know the exact details, generally the company would be required to compensate whoever was suing them. There wouldn’t be direct consequences to the person distributing the memo, but if the company didn’t do anything to discipline and/or counsel the person then they would be very vulnerable to future lawsuits alleging that it’s a pattern, and definitely wouldn’t be able to argue ‘one bad apple’. Technically there might be criminal charges but AFAIK those laws are only used in really exceptional circumstances.
Here’s an example of a successful lawsuit along those lines:
Also, I hadn’t seen the story that prompted this question. Since it was prompted by a letter sent from a political organization, there probably are additional laws in effect that would not apply to a regular business that do apply to a political party, but I don’t know the specifics.
In a general sense it also depends on the job. For example it has been deemed legal for women’s shelters to refuse male job applicants.
In this specific case it’s about IT jobs with the DNC so they can’t really argue along those lines. However from the article I read about this email it said:
Despite the implications, I’m not sure that expressing a personal preference for a certain candidate would qualify as discrimination if they were still considering (or pretending to consider) all applications that came in despite this preference.
The email says not to forward it to “cisgender straight white males” but it’s not the only way that the jobs are being advertised. I found the same openings on their website without any such mention and with the usual non-discrimination statement, “The DNC is an equal opportunity employer and it is our policy to recruit, hire, train, promote and administer any and all personnel actions without regard to sex, race, age, color, creed, national origin, religion, economic status, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity or expression, ethnic identity or disability, or any other legally protected basis.”
IANAL but I doubt a “cisgender straight white male” would have a case based simply on the existence of that letter. (And IMHO including that statement was dumbass. There are better ways to accomplish the same thing.)
I specifically avoiding referencing any actual alleged instance in the OP because I didn’t want to get tied up in a discussion of whether it happened or the political angle if it did. This is a GQ question about a hypothetical case.
Have any attorneys stopped by to answer this one? I don’t know legally, but it seems to me this goes against the whole idea that a company does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or religion. I might be way off base here, but isn’t that part of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act? It sounds to me like there could be legal ramifications to put that out there, idk.
Saying “I personally would prefer…[someone other than a protected class]” in an internal email is not discrimination as long as all applications are still considered. Adding the words “personally” and “prefer” were very likely a deliberate choice of words to prevent any such charges from being made.
This is a very strange situation. Is the current workforce composed exclusively of gay or trans people of color? If not, straight white cisgender males already working there might have grounds for a discrimination suit: they did not have access to the same information as other workers, plus they presumably would not be considered for any of the listed positions.
The email is an incredibly stupid move. If I send an email saying, “Please don’t (tell, forward, send) this to X people,” I’m certainly implying I’m knowingly doing something that could get me in trouble.