Posts belonging to Category EEOC

Although the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) became law back in 2008, the EEOC — which enforces the law — has filed only two lawsuits since then charging employers with illegally asking employees/job applicants for their family medical histories.

One of those lawsuits — against Tulsa, Okla.-based Fabricut Inc. — was settled last week. The EEOC had charged the company with violating GINA by purportedly asking job applicant Rhonda Jones (whom it was considering for the position of memo clerk) for her family medical history as part of a post-offer medical exam. Fabricut asked Jones to — as a condition of its job offer — undergo an evaluation for carpal tunnel syndrome by her personal physician, and to undergo a pre-employment lab test and physical by its contract medical examiner. Although Jones’ doctor concluded she did not have CTS, the company says its medical examiner says she either had the syndrome or was predisposed to develop it, and it rescinded the job offer. Earlier this month, Fabricut agreed to settle the suit by paying $50,000 and offering other relief without admitting any wrongdoing.

Last week, the EEOC announced another GINA-related lawsuit, this one against Corning, N.Y.-based Founders Pavilion Inc., a nursing and rehabilitation center. According to the suit, the company conducted post-offer, pre-employment medical exams of applicants in which they were asked for their family medical history. The exams were repeated annually if the person was hired.

The EEOC also charged Founders with violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by firing one employee after refusing to accommodate her and refusing to hire two women because of perceived disabilities.

Elizabeth Grossman, the regional attorney in the EEOC’s New York District Office, had this to say in a statement:

GINA applies whenever an employer conducts a medical exam, and employers must make sure that they or their agents do not violate the law.”

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A Davenport, Iowa, jury awarded the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity just yesterday the largest-ever verdict in the agency’s history — more than $240 million — in a case involving the long-term abuse of workers with intellectual disabilities.

The class-action case against Hill Country Farms Inc., doing business as Henry’s Turkey Services, was actually covered by me back in April 2011 in this news analysis. Here, too, is the ruling by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa, Davenport Division, in September 2012, granting the EEOC partial summary judgment to move forward and also ordering the Goldthwaite, Texas, company to pay the workers $1.3 million for unlawful disability-based wage discrimination.

Coupled with yesterday’s awards of $2 million and $5.5 million for each of the 32 mentally disabled turkey processing-plant workers, for punitive and compensatory damages, respectively, the total judgment — to be exact — comes to $241.3.

The links above, along with this release by the EEOC, spell out all the sad, sordid details of this now-historic case. But just to recap here, the EEOC lawsuit says that, for many years, the owners and staffers of Henry’s Turkey subjected the workers to abusive verbal and physical harassment; restricted their freedom of movement; and imposed other harsh terms and conditions of employment, such as requiring them to live in deplorable and substandard living conditions, and failing to provide adequate medical care when needed.

The EEOC also claims verbal abuses, including frequently referring to the workers as “retarded,” “dumb ass” and “stupid.” Members of the class reported acts of physical abuse as well, including hitting, kicking, at least one case of handcuffing, forcing the men to carry heavy weights as punishment and being dismissive of complaints of injuries or pain.

“The verdict sends an important message that the conduct that occurred here is intolerable in this nation, and hopefully will help to restore dignity and acknowledge the humanity of workers who were mistreated for so many years,” says EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien.

According to this Fox News account, an attorney for Henry’s didn’t respond to a message seeking comment. But the company’s president, Kenneth Henry, told the Quad-City Times after the trial  that he planned to appeal, calling some of the evidence “terribly exaggerated.”

The news account also says it’s highly unlikely the now-defunct Henry’s Turkey Service has anywhere near enough remaining assets to cover the $7.5 million in damages each man was just awarded.

“Do you think I can write a check for that?” Kenneth Henry, 72, the company’s president, told the newspaper.

But federal officials are vowing to recover every last cent they can for the men, who had been “virtually enslaved” for many years, according to developmental psychologist Sue Gant, who  interviewed them at length for the EEOC, the account states.

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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is still wading through testimony gathered Friday during its briefing to determine what impact the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidance on criminal-background checks is having or may have on the employment of black and Hispanic workers.

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be a precise timetable for an ensuing report and/or recommendation from the civil rights commission, or specific plan for the guidance, which the EEOC issued on April 25. But safe to say, one overriding theme of the Dec. 7 testimony – taken from 17 different individuals, representing employer groups, advocacy organizations, screening groups and providers, and employment sectors across the country – came in loud and clear: Businesses need to continue screening for criminal histories and they need some clarifications on portions of the guidance or they will remain, as one testified, “between a rock and a hard place.”

In the words of the USCCR, in its announcement about the Friday briefing, “the commission has initiated this investigation to determine whether the new EEOC guidance policy or other prohibitions or limitations on the use of criminal background checks results in lower job opportunities and reduced employment overall among minorities, including non-offenders.”

In other words, the commision’s concern – as raised over the past year by one of its commissioners, Peter Kirsanow – is that, for employers to either remove or not rely so heavily on the criminal-conviction question in a job application, as the EEOC has recommended, they might be creating a hiring system that, in turn, encourages discrimination of black and Hispanic males due to the sheer larger incarcertaion rates for these minorities.

As Rich Mellor – vice president of loss prevention for the Washington-based National Retail Federation and one of those testifying – told me in a follow-up phone call, “without that confirmation that an applicant does not have a criminal background,” an employer might be prone to try that much harder to hire a non-minority.

Even with such a confirmation, or disclosure of a criminal record and the chance to explain, minority job applicants are often hobbled by still-pervasive racial bias in hiring, according to testimony from Glenn E. Martin, vice president of development and public affairs for The Fortune Society, based in New York. He cited a Princeton University study of the low-wage labor market in New York that showed black and Latino applicants with clean backgrounds fared no better than white applicants just released from prison.

“Moreover,” Martin testified, “the positive outcomes for black applicants, when presenting evidence of a criminal record, were reduced by 57 percent.”

Mellor, in his testimony, raised an additional red flag about the transparency of this crucial criminal-background conversation. The EEOC guidelines, he said, ”were enacted without giving retailers or other employers a chance for input,” according to an NRF release issued just after the briefing. “Hearings,” it says, quoting Mellor, “were held only with a ‘select group of predetermined stakeholders’ and actual text of the guidelines was released only the same morning that they were approved and implemented by the EEOC.”

The EEOC gave me this response today to the NRF’s release:

The NRF and other business groups communicated their views to the EEOC, and we considered them during the development of the guidance. Representatives of employers, individuals with criminal records, and other federal agencies testified at public EEOC meetings in November 2008 and July 2011.  The [EEOC] also received and reviewed approximately 300 written comments from members of the general public and stakeholder groups that responded to topics discussed during the July 2011 meeting.

The stakeholders that provided statements to express their interests and concerns include prominent organizations such as the Retail Industry Leaders Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Society for Human Resource Management, the American Insurance Association, the National Association of Professional Background Screeners, the NAACP, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and the D.C. Prisoners’ Project, among others. Additionally, throughout the process of drafting the guidance, individual commissioners and staff met with representatives from various stakeholder groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, SHRM, HR Policy Association, College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, the National Employment Law Project and the Equal Employment Advisory Council to obtain more focused feedback on discrete and complex issues.

Many of those organizations listed above had people testifying Friday before the USCCR as well, in addition to employment lawyers Jackson Lewis and Duane Morris, screening provider EmployeeScreenIQ, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and many more.

Duane Morris’ Jonathan Segal, who testified Friday on behalf of SHRM, told the commissioners that some state and federal laws require employers to conduct background checks for positions such as daycare providers and firefighters. EEOC guidance, he said, puts employers in the tenuous position of “losing their state license if they don’t comply with a state law mandating criminal background checks and risking a class-action lawsuit if they go forward with criminal background checks and base hiring on the results.”

In addition, he said, the guidance’s interpretation of disparate impact appears to make employers “vulnerable to an EEOC investigation any time they take an adverse employment action against individuals of certain races or national origins based on criminal background checks regardless of whether they have conducted a valid individualized assessment — seemingly making criminal convictions a new protected status.”

Rest assured I will be following this and will report developments as I catch wind of them. Pretty packed with pressing issues for employers, I’d say.

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A recent federal district court decision may give companies a useful weapon to defend themselves in litigation with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In the case of EEOC v. DHL Express, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois has granted the logistics provider’s motion to compel the EEOC to make all claimants in the case available for deposition.

In the suit, a group of 94 black drivers and dockworkers for DHL Express in Chicago claimed they had been unlawfully given less desirable, more difficult and more dangerous route and dock assignments than white employees. In addition, the claimants alleged they were typically assigned routes in predominantly black areas.

The EEOC had refused to let DHL depose all of the claimants involved, contending the vignettes the EEOC had provided for each claimant in the interrogatories were sufficient, as were the company’s depositions of 34 of the plaintiffs. Further, the agency argued that deposing each claimant would be unnecessarily expensive and redundant.

The court, however, determined that “expenses are being incurred based on how the EEOC has decided to prosecute this case overall, including hiring an expert to analyze route assignments. The court will not jeopardize DHL’s opportunity to defend itself in order to accommodate the expense of plaintiff’s litigation strategy.”

This was just one court’s opinion, and others may not apply the same reasoning in the future. But the DHL decision may give the EEOC cause to rethink its approach to litigation going forward, says Jeff Nowak, partner and co-chair of the labor and employment practice group at Chicago-based law firm Franczek Radelet.

“Over the past few years, the EEOC has pursued an aggressive agenda to expand the scope of its charge investigations to focus on systemic discrimination,” he says. “As a result, it regularly subpoenas employer documents that far exceed any semblance of reasonableness. Unfortunately, it has a track record of approaching litigation in a similar fashion.”

The ruling in the DHL Express case, however, levels the playing field to some extent, “in that employers now are better able to confront purported charging parties and class members to test the veracity of these individuals’ claims and mount an adequate defense,” says Nowak.  

Will [this decision] stem the tide of EEOC litigation against employers? No. But it sends a message to the EEOC that it must carefully evaluate potential litigation before filing suit, and set aside any ‘hide the ball’ tactics when engaged in litigation.”

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Came across an interesting just-launched website devoted solely to providing employers and their HR teams with, as the site says, “expert, creative, and cost-effective solutions for managing the burgeoning risk of workplace EEO disputes.”

A bit too focused, you might ask? Au contraire, says Merrily Archer, an employment attorney and founder of Denver-based EEO Legal Solutions and it’s brand new site. Here’ how she describes “the gathering EEO storm” on her home page:

The number of EEOC charges will hit 100,000 in 2012, with increasing prevalence of age, disability, retaliation and systemic (‘disparate impact’) charges. In-house counsel now report that employment matters, both administrative activity and litigation, rank first in amount and frequency. No doubt, the ‘face’ and frequency of discrimination has changed markedly since the Civil Rights Act of 1991, ranging from pro se individual charges to full-blown EEOC systemic investigations and class-action litigation. Given the variable risk inherent in EEOC charges and EEO litigation, employers must master claim avoidance, evaluation, and resource allocation to avoid defraying expensive external ‘solutions’ to comparatively minor EEO problems.

Archer, a former attorney with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, know’s from whence she speaks. She’s been a key and outspoken source for HRE on the EEOC’s aggressive systemic push of late, in this piece, this one, and this, to share just three. She also contributed this byline for us on how to fight back against the push.

Her new site, she says, offers employers’ existing HR and legal teams coaching and training ”to reduce reliance on outside counsel and by extension, expensive ‘solutions’ to more minor EEO problems. Through lean litigation, EEO Legal Solutions proves that employers can still afford to fight when they’re right.”

For your frame of reference, and an understanding of what the EEOC is after, here is the agency’s selected list of systemic hiring resolutions and filings as of April and a full rundown of the systemic focus when it was initially proposed years ago.

I especially like Archer’s blog post on her site itemizing the reasons “Our Workplaces Don’t Work”:

Since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, our workplaces have become ‘overlawyered’ regulatory quagmires in which employers balance competing laws and risks on a daily basis: the risk of a negligent hiring/entrustment/supervision claim versus the risk of an EEOC systemic investigation over use of pertinent criminal background information; the risk of retaining an underperforming employee versus the risk of an EEOC charge; the risk of workers’ compensation claims against the risks of claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act, as amended, and the absurdly complicated Family and Medical Leave Act; the risk of financial collapse versus the risk of individual and systemic EEO claims arising from a necessary reduction-in-force; the risk of going out of business versus the risk that the EEOC will impose its judgment regarding what constitutes ‘successful’ job performance … and on it goes … employers have become stuck in this ‘damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t’ EEO regulatory maelstrom, sacrificing basic management considerations of employee accountability, reliability and even competency.

William Tate, president of Chicago-based HR Plus screening solutions, talked about that first risk when he and I met at the Society for Human Resource Management conference this past June. He likened the EEOC’s background-screening mandate to a kind of “Sophie’s Choice” for his clients between following the new rules and keeping their workplaces safe.

The cost alone of retraining recruiters to conduct and document individual reviews for each former convict, he told me, threatens many (especially smaller and mid-sized) employers’ survivals.

And he didn’t even mention the legal costs Archer says she aims to spare employers.

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In what appears to be a continuation of its revved up enforcement of – and attention to – workers’ rights, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has taken another employee group under its wing: teenagers.

The agency announced recently its release of a new set of free informational aides, developed as part of its Youth@Work initiative to educate America’s young people about their employment rights and responsibilities, and to help employers create positive environments for them.

This Society for Human Resource Management release about the effort (subscription required) says the new tools include a video, student manual and teacher’s manual, and can be downloaded by youth organizations, businesses and any other group wishing to educate young people about what to expect in the working world.

As EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien said in a statement about the program: “As young people enter the workforce, it is important that they understand their rights and know how to respond if they experience or witness unlawful discrimination or harassment.”

Whether this move adds to the already enhanced force of EEOC’s employer investigations and litigation, the real issue, says Michael J. Lotito, a shareholder with San Francisco-based employment law firm Littler, is whether the government gets first crack at molding teenagers’ impressions of work or the employer does.

“Everyone should be aware of their rights in the workplace,” he says. “Young people need to be educated, perhaps more than most, as they may be intimidated more easily by their boss, not have enough ‘real life’ experience to know how to handle [harassment or discrimination] and may even be so embarrassed by the event that they quit instead of complain.

“The message to employers is, ‘Do you want that education to come in the first instance from the government or from the organization?’ Is the message, ‘If something like this happens to you, go to the government’ or is it, ‘Come to us under our policies for resolution’?” Lotito says. “For the supervisors, using the government information as part of proactive, [employer-provided] training is a realistic approach to be considered. ”

He continues:

In the end, the culture of compliance and respect for all employees will take place either because the employer takes the time to invest in its workforce or because the government forces the company to do so.

One final note: I would love for the government to tell young people what they need to learn in school to help them get a job, why the skills gap in this country should be seen as an opportunity [and] how a job applicant with little or no experience can be a valuable resource nonetheless. Sure, we need to ensure people are treated right on the job, but they first need a job before those rights attach.”

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Just a brief note to inform or remind anyone in need of either that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is open to your thoughts on its Strategic Enforcement Plan. But that open window is fast closing.

A public meeting was held last Wednesday — July 18 – in Washington to take in comments from academicians, civil-rights representatives, business and federal-sector communities, as well as former EEOC leaders and current employees about the agency’s SEP, which — by terms of the agency’s overriding Strategic Plan – must be in place by Oct. 1.

In its release about the public meeting, the EEOC states that it will “hold open the … meeting record for 15 days [by my calculation of business days, that's through Aug. 8, but I'll let you know if that needs revising], and invites audience members, as well as other members of the public, to submit written comments on any issues or matters discussed at the meeting.” (Here are the minutes and testimonials from that meeting.)

According to the release, “participants noted the importance of the EEOC continuing to use systemic investigations and litigation to target specific issues and practices where government enforcement will have the greatest impact.”

In the words of EEOC Chair Jacqualine Berrien, “We welcome the views of interested members of the public as we consider how to better leverage the EEOC’s resources to improve enforcement, outreach and customer service. An open strategic planning process ensures that the commission is prepared for 21st-century challenges and also honors the spirit of open government.”

You can send your comments to Commission Meeting, EEOC Executive Officer, 131 M Street, N.W., Washington, DC, 20507, or email them to Commissionmeetingcomments@eeoc.gov.

Speak now or forever hold your peace.

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I’m getting interesting feedback from attorneys close to the recently-decided EEOC vs. The Picture People case, suggesting the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in favor of the national retail portrait studio chain marks a new wind blowing in from the federal courts — one that is increasingly critical of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The ruling, issued July 10, denies the EEOC’s appeal of a 2011 ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. That ruling granted summary judgment for Picture People on the grounds that its requirement that studio ”performers” be strong in verbal-communication skills did not discriminate against a deaf worker.

In a nutshell, Picture People hired Jessica Chrysler in 2007 to work as a photographer in one of the company’s Littleton, Colo., studios, knowing she was deaf. Although she performed a number of her duties, she was later moved into the lab because of the difficulties she had communicating with customers by writing notes. (Though the company initially tried her out this way, it found the note writing was cumbersome and awkward given the 20-minute duration of each portrait sitting.) Picture People eventually cut her hours and she eventually left her job.

The EEOC sued, claiming the company did not do enough to accommodate her and the District Court sided with the company, holding that oral communication was an essential function of the performer job. The appeals court upheld that. For a whole lot more on this case than I could possibly blog about, here is a piece written for HREOnline^™ by Merrily S. Archer of EEO Solutions in Denver, the attorney representing Picture People, and here is a summary of the District Court decision  as well as a summary of this latest Appeals Court ruling from a blog by Seyfarth Shaw partner Gerald L. Maatman Jr.

Although the EEOC press release announcing its lawsuit in October, 2009, was recently taken down from the agency’s website, my printed copy offers a much different account, saying “managers picked on Chrysler, forced her to work in the back of the store away from the public, and ultimately, eliminated her work hours entirely.” It also claims she was retaliated against for complaining. “Employers all too frequently underestimate the ability of deaf employees to serve in a customer-service capacity,” EEOC Phoenix Regional Attorney Mary Jo O’Neill says in that release.

On the contrary, Archer says, “this case is huge, because it demonstrates just how far the EEOC will go to substitute its judgment for our employers’ regarding what constitutes minimally effective job performance. As I laid out in my response brief,” she says, “Congress was very clear when it passed the Americans with Disabilities Act that an employer would never be required to fundamentally alter the essential functions of a job to accommodate a disabled employee.

“When Bush (41) signed the ADA into law on July 26, 1990, he talked about the careful balances that Congress struck between the disabled and employer communities,” says Archer. “This decision helps restore that balance from the weight of the EEOC’s aggressive ADA interpretations and enforcement.”

What’s even more interesting, says Maatman, chair of his firm’s class-action defense group, is that this decision is actually “one in a series of cases in which federal judges have, in essence, rejected the EEOC lawsuits for having [little to no] evidence to back them up.” He lists these other recent decisions against the EEOC on his blog as illustration:

* EEOC vs. Cintas Corp., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 86228 (E.D. Mich. Aug. 4, 2011) (ordering the EEOC to pay defendant $2,638,443.93 in attorneys’ fees and costs),
* EEOC vs. Tricore Ref. Labs., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 151417 (D. N.M. Oct. 26, 2011) (ordering the EEOC to pay defendant $140,571.62 in attorneys’’ fees),
* EEOC vs. CRST Van Expedited Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11125 (N.D. Iowa Feb. 9, 2010) (ordering the EEOC to pay defendant $4,467,442.90 in attorneys’ fees),
* EEOC vs. CRST Van Expedited Inc., 679 F.3d 657, 698 (8th Cir. Iowa 2012) (reversing and remanding the district court’s award of $4,467,442.90 in attorneys’ fees).

He’s telling his CHRO clients to make sure they discuss this new atmosphere in the judiciary with their legal counsel. “Knowing the EEOC has been sanctioned around the nation is one of a number of factors upon which you should [plot your defense, should you be the subject of an EEOC lawsuit].”

For the record, P. David Lopez, general counsel for the EEOC, says his agency “does not file unsubstantiated claims [and] we do not think there is a new trend in the federal judicial system finding against the EEOC due to lack of evidence.”

Like I said back at the top of this monolithic blog post, interesting feedback.

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I don’t personally know U.S. District Court Judge Robert Lasnik, of course, but I can make a pretty reasonable guess that when he decides to make his next home-electronics purchase, it won’t be at Fry’s Electronics.

The San Jose, Calif.-based retail chain is being sued by the EEOC, which alleges an assistant store manager at one of its locations sexually harassed a store employee  and that a supervisor was fired in retaliation after he complained to upper management about the store manager’s behavior. The trial is set for November, but in the meantime Fry’s has been sanctioned twice by Judge Lasnik for what appears to be some pretty outrageous behavior.

In the latest sanction, announced earlier this month, Lasnik ordered the retailer to pay a $100,000 penalty for intentionally withholding evidence, raising a “fallacious” argument and demonstrating a “disturbing lack of candor to the tribunal.” “The Court finds that defendant’s conduct in this respect was unfair, unwarranted, unprincipled and unacceptable,” Lasnik said in announcing the sanctions. “Defendant has deliberately engaged in deceptive practices that undermine the integrity and orderly administration of these proceedings.”

In May, the court sanctioned Fry’s for willfully destroying the hard drives where relevant information would have been stored and ordered that the jury be instructed to make an “adverse inference” on one of Fry’s defenses.

In the latest sanction, the court found that the retailer withheld evidence of similar allegations of sexual harassment against the same assistant store manager by a different employee in 2001. Although this evidence had been requested by the plaintiffs, Fry’s withheld it until the end of May, just a few weeks before a related arbitration hearing held on this matter last month.

“As trial attorneys, we all expect zealous advocacy from the other side, but we also expect all parties to a lawsuit to play fair,” said EEOC Supervisory Trial Attorney John Stanley in an EEOC statement announcing the sanction. “Violating discovery rules and orders of the court drags our profession down and does nothing to further the cause of justice.”

Fry’s Electronics is being represented by the Jackson Lewis law firm, which did not respond to requests for comment.

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To mix a couple metaphors, the fallout from today’s updated enforcement guidance from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — specific to employers’ use of arrest and conviction records in employment decisions under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – has just left the gate.

The EEOC voted 4-1 today to approve the guidance document and also issued a question-and-answer document about it. Both documents can be found here.

“We had excellent testimony from two public meetings and hundreds of written comments submitted by a diverse group of commenters to inform our deliberations concerning the new guidance,” said EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien in announcing the vote. ”The new guidance clarifies and updates the EEOC’s long-standing policy concerning the use of arrest and conviction records in employment, which will assist job seekers, employees, employers and many other agency stakeholders.”

The guidance appears to have many supporters, including the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. In a letter to the EEOC prior to the vote, the Conference, joined by 54 other organizations, said that “due in part to racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing schemes, racial and ethnic disparities persist at all stages of the criminal justice system. … These inequities in the criminal justice system only magnify the discriminatory barriers already experienced by minorities and low-income individuals living in the United States.” (The link includes the full letter if you scroll down.)

I’m still waiting for a flood of legal alerts about today’s decision to balance out the applause and kudos. I’m sure they’ll be coming. In the meantime, advice issued Thursday by White Plains, N.Y.-based employment law firm Jackson Lewis gets to the heart of what employers might expect and should be doing in light of the new guidance.

“It is expected that the EEOC’s new guidance will substantially modify existing EEOC guidance on criminal background checks, which has been in existence since 1987,” the Jackson Lewis post reads. “Employers seeking to avoid Title VII litigation risks anticipated from the new guidelines may have to reconsider and refine their use of criminal background checks in making employment decisions, and individuals posing increased risk to co-workers, customers and the public, and to employers, may be hired or retained.

“Employers should review and modify, as necessary, their current criminal background-check practices once the new guidance is made known,” it reads.

That’s today, folks. Let the reviewing begin.

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