|
|||
|
|
|
||||||
|
Feds Give Failing Grade to Literacy Test
A literacy test administered to job applicants by Georgia-Pacific Corp. was found to be discriminatory to African-American job applicants by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Attorneys warn other companies to watch out.
Georgia-Pacific Corp. not only wanted the workers it hired at one of its paper mills in Georgia to be able to read and understand safety instructions and manuals, but also to be literate enough for promotion to other positions within the company. Therefore, it required new hires at the mill to pass a literacy test in which they were asked to read bus schedules, product labels and other "real-life stimuli" to test their reading. There was just one problem with the test: A disproportionate number of African-American applicants failed it. And that ultimately led to Georgia-Pacific paying a fine of $749,076 to the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which uncovered the discrepancy during a routine audit of the company's hiring practices. The money will be distributed to 399 black applicants who applied for jobs at the company while the test was being used. Employers subject to OFCCP rules -- which includes all federal contractors -- should remember that when it comes to that agency's regulations, there's no such thing as a standardized test for job candidates, says employment attorney Neil Martin. "The OFCCP requires that you use employment tests that are validated, and that they cannot be validated on a group basis," says Martin, a partner at Gardere Wynne Sewell in Houston. "In other words, the lumber industry cannot have a test for everyone who does job X; it has to be validated for each employer." If a test does has an adverse impact on a protected group of job applicants, he adds, then the employer needs to assess whether there are alternative means of testing for the same skills in a way that doesn't have a discriminatory impact on that group, or have the test validated to ensure it measures the skills necessary for the job in question. In this case, the OFCCP determined that the literacy test was not valid for the jobs being filled, says Martin. That's not to say employers are being forced to jeopardize safe workplaces in order to avoid discriminating, he adds. "Safety is a legitimate concern, but there are other ways to ensure it without administering literacy tests to job applicants. Some companies print their safety instructions in Spanish, Vietnamese or other languages besides English. Others use safety videos, or they reduce the level of their safety instructions from college-level English to high-school or elementary level." Jennifer Blum Feldman, an employment attorney at Wolf Block in Philadelphia, says employers need to be cautious in ensuring that any tests they use for employee selection conform to the "uniform guidelines on employee selection procedures" used by the OFCCP, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and other federal departments and agencies. "The OFCCP is using the guidelines as a mechanism for eliminating systemic discrimination in the workplace, and employers need to be aware of that," she says. "If an employment test has an adverse impact, then the obligation under the guidelines is to conduct validity studies, which can be a complicated process," she says. For this and other reasons, many employers today shy away from using literacy tests in the manner that Georgia-Pacific did, Blum Feldman says. Patty Prats-Swanson, a spokeswoman for Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific, told the Associated Press that the company puts a high priority on a literate workforce because it promotes heavily from within and workers often move from job to job within a particular plant. The company manufactures tissue paper, construction materials and other wood-related products at more than 350 locations around the globe and has approximately 50,000 employees. Martin says that although the company's stated reasons for using the test were "noble," the manner in which it was being used was inappropriate. "If they're testing applicants with the goal of promoting them, then, in effect, they're testing an entry-level candidate for a supervisory position," he says. "The lesson here is that if you're going to have a test for a job, it has to be for that particular job -- not some future job." August 27, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications |
||||||
Print
Email
Write to the Editor
Reprints
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
|
© Copyright 2010 LRP Publications. All rights reserved.
|
||||