COVERT BIAS : Discrimination remains a problem at some job agencies, but it’s hidden and hard to fight.
Audrey Quintero, a Berkeley woman just starting a week of training for her new job as a counselor at a temporary help agency, couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
The point of this business is to make money, Quintero recalled the trainer explaining, no matter what the laws say about discrimination.
So if a company calls and says it wants to hire only men, just fill out the “male” section of the job order form under the heading “Appropriate Dress,” the trainer told Quintero. If the company wants only women, fill out the “female” section. Don’t worry; the authorities won’t be able to figure out the code.
When an employer says he will hire only “the highest-qualified candidate,” the trainer told Quintero, that means that she should send only whites. And if they tell her that they don’t want gays or Latinos or blacks? “We simply comply.”
Quintero--who recounts the story in a lawsuit she filed against the employment agency, Temporaries Inc.--may have stumbled upon the dirtiest little secret of the personnel industry.
Government experts, lawyers and employment agency workers say a small but persistent share of the nation’s 20,000-odd permanent and temporary placement services continue to engage in systematic, surreptitious discrimination against women, minorities and older workers.
Although lawyers for Temporaries Inc. have dismissed Quintero’s charges as “a figment of this woman’s imagination,” hers is only one of several recent cases to contend that plantation-era attitudes endure in the fast-growing personnel placement business:
- A division of Kelly Services, the temporary industry’s second-biggest company, entered into a consent decree in March with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to settle charges that for at least five years its Phoenix office had made job assignments on the basis of its workers’ race.
When customers asked Kelly Assisted Living Services--which supplies nurses and health aides to shut-ins--not to send blacks, Latinos or American Indians, the firm met their demands, former company supervisors told the EEOC. Managers reminded the staff every couple of months not to place blacks on jobs in Sun City, a 99%-white retirement community. The rationale, Kelly officials told the commission, was to save minorities the embarrassment of being rejected by clients.
Kelly did not admit any wrongdoing in agreeing to pay up to $5,000 in back earnings to employees who lost assignments, to train workers in its anti-bias policies and to allow the EEOC broad access to its records for a three-year monitoring period.
- Early in June, the commission filed a lawsuit charging that another Kelly division in Phoenix had discriminated against a Latino woman by withdrawing her from a job assignment because her temporary employer at an apartment complex didn’t like her accent.
Together, state and federal authorities received 348 complaints of discrimination by employment agencies of all kinds last year. Kelly, with 564,000 employees, was the subject of 45 bias charges--about 13% of the total, close to its share of the temporary help market.
- Interplace/Transworld Recruit, a Los Angeles-based subsidiary of Japan’s scandal-plagued Recruit Co., is under investigation by the EEOC, which charged late in May that the firm used a secret code in its internal records to keep track both of job applicants’ ages, race and sex and of employers’ hiring preferences.
If an employer wanted to hire whites between ages 20 and 35 only, for instance, an Interplace memo instructed agency workers to write, “Talk to Mary; Suite 20-35,” on the job order. “Do Not Talk to Maryanne” meant that the employer refused to hire blacks, according to the memo, one of several company documents that the commission made public in court filings.
- Employees of another Recruit subsidiary in Los Angeles, Recruit U.S.A., made plans for a hiring campaign for IBM Japan in which non-Asians would be denied consideration, according to another memo filed in court by the commission.
Recruit lawyers say there is no evidence that the companies discriminated against job seekers, and they have charged in court that the EEOC violated criminal law by publicizing its investigation. Officials of IBM Japan have said Recruit misunderstood their wishes and that they have no indication that the commission suspects IBM of misconduct.
Industry leaders acknowledge that, 20 or 30 years ago, discrimination was as widespread in the personnel placement business as it was everywhere else in the hiring world. But they are insistent that such acts today are the isolated, outlaw practices of a handful of placement workers willing to violate clear company policies to boost their earnings or satisfy customer demands.
Pander to Requests
“To do this on a regular or one-time basis is suicidal,” said Samuel R. Sacco, executive vice president of the National Assn. of Temporary Services, headquartered in Alexandria, Va. “Even if we wanted to do it, we can’t afford to discriminate, because we don’t have enough people in this country to fill the job orders we’ve got.”
But civil rights authorities say it is clear that some placement firms--whatever their official policies--are perpetuating job bias by pandering to their clients’ discriminatory requests.
“It’s great to have a policy, but the bottom line is they’re out there to make money, and unfortunately it’s the clients’ wishes that reign supreme,” said Sandra J. Padegimas, a trial attorney in Phoenix for the EEOC.
Lynn Eaton, a regional manager in Downey for United Temporary Services, had her ethics put to the test early this year.
A client needed a receptionist. The qualifications? “Blond, blue-eyed, thin and unmarried,” the personnel clerk told Eaton, president of the Los Angeles County chapter of the California Assn. of Temporary Services. “I said, ‘Do you realize you just violated every labor code there is?’ ”
Abiding by the policy favored by her trade association, Eaton said she refused to fill the discriminatory job order. Instead, she offered to send the best qualified candidates to the job, whatever their color, looks or background--and thereby lost a customer.
“It’s difficult as business people to walk away from business,” Eaton said. “However, we have to make decisions about what kind of business we want to have and how we conduct that business.”
The biggest employment firms--Kelly and Manpower--train their employees to walk away from clients who list illegal racial, sexual or age-related characteristics when they place an order for permanent or temporary workers.
Has Strict Policy
“If you were to ask me to swear on a stack of Bibles I know for sure no field office is doing that, I couldn’t do it,” said Mitchell S. Fromstein, chief executive of Milwaukee-based Manpower and its British parent, Blue Arrow PLC, the world’s largest employment services company. “But I would be shocked and disappointed if I learned anybody was.”
Kelly’s policy, likewise, leaves little room for doubt: “We will not accept any order or be involved in any situation that requires or implies discrimination.”
Yet Donna J. Rheaves says that when she tried to follow that policy, she was fired.
Rheaves had enjoyed working for Kelly in the Washington suburbs, so when she moved to Phoenix, she took a job in 1984 at Kelly Assisted Living (known at the time as Kelly Health Care), with responsibility for hiring and firing home and institutional health workers.
This was not the Kelly that Rheaves had known before. When county agencies called for temporary workers, the Phoenix office sent blacks, reasoning that most of the county’s clients were black, Rheaves said. If retirees in Sun City said they would not accept minorities as home aides, Kelly wrote the racial preference on the job order and sent only whites.
Rheaves, who is black, refused to go along. “I’m of the thinking that I didn’t want to be sued,” she explained. “If a company or a private individual said, ‘I don’t want a black person, will you send me a white person?’ I said, ‘We are an equal opportunity employer.’ ”
Although Reaves helped boost the office’s revenue and had been promoted just a month before, Kelly fired her without warning in January, 1985, for what EEOC investigators later concluded were trumped-up reasons. Kelly paid Rheaves $28,000 to settle her discrimination charge and later signed the consent decree ending the broader investigation that she had inspired.
But Rheaves has yet to rebound from the experience. With her 8-year-old son, she has been on and off welfare, sometimes sleeping in a car, while she has struggled to get a permanent job. When companies learn that she once filed a discrimination case against an employer, Rheaves explained, they grow wary.
“People look at you as a troublemaker,” said Rheaves, who now lives near Atlanta. “I sometimes do regret what I did. It’s hurt my son. We’ve had to live a whole different life style. And it seems like I can’t get back to where we were.”
Difficult to Catch
Civil rights agencies laid down the law against discrimination by employment services in the early 1970s. A series of EEOC decisions struck down such hoary industry practices as reserving higher-paid jobs for whites and assigning blacks only to domestic work, or policies against referring women for management jobs.
Catching agencies in the act of discrimination has grown harder since then. Job seekers often are unaware that they have been the victims of bias--they may get a placement, just not the best one--so government officials are dependent on workers within employment firms.
“And when they leave, they don’t want to say anything, because they’ll be blackballed,” said Carol Schiller, regional administrator in Los Angeles for the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission. Hamstrung by a lack of funds, Schiller has dropped plans to conduct a hearing on employment agencies’ conduct. But she has been invited to lecture the local temporary help association in the fall.
Lately, Japanese companies--unaccustomed to operating in a multicultural land--have become a focus in the United States of complaints about employment discrimination. The personnel placement industry is no exception to the trend.
In addition to the ongoing investigation of Recruit, former employees contend that Persona, another large Japanese employment services firm with U.S. headquarters in Los Angeles, has systematically discriminated against minorities and women in job placements. Several of the ex-employees have themselves filed bias charges against the company.
Used Coded References
When Persona established U.S. operations four years ago, ex-employees say, separate files were kept for job applications from older women and blacks to avoid placing such workers in Japanese-owned companies that preferred not to hire them. Or a black dot would be used to signify a black’s application.
The former employees say a gummed note describing the job seeker’s appearance was attached to most applications, designed for easy disposal if some government investigator came snooping. Later, they said, coded references to applicants’ race, age and sex were placed in personnel records.
Persona President Muneaki Ueda--seated in his downtown Los Angeles office beneath a photo showing him arm in arm with Florence Griffith Joyner, the black track star who is Persona’s celebrity spokesperson in Japan--denied that the company has ever set out to discriminate.
Some employees may have made furtive notes about job seekers’ characteristics, he conceded, but if so, they were violating company policies. Yet Ueda acknowledged that until recently, workers received little training in those policies.
“The corporate policy was clear in my mind, and I thought that all the managers were clear,” said Ueda, who also had difficulty, during an interview, recalling one of his chief critics, a man who was his top assistant from 1985 to 1987. “But I cannot be 100%.”
Ueda said he wants Persona to be a leader among Japanese companies in understanding American business norms.
How? He’s conducting seminars for other Japanese businesses on how to abide by anti-discrimination laws.
