Unemployed may be discriminated against when looking for job

In a public meeting held in February, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission examined the impact of employers considering only those currently employed for job vacancies.
During the meeting Helen Norton, associate professor at the Univ. of Colo. School of Law, said that employers and staffing agencies have publicly advertised jobs with the explicit restriction that only currently employed candidates will be considered.
“Some employers may use current employment as a signal of quality job performance,” said Norton. “But such a correlation is decidedly weak. A blanket reliance on current employment serves as a poor proxy for successful job performance.”
Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for Education and Employment at the National Women’s Law Center said “The use of an individual’s current or recent unemployment status as a hiring selection device is a troubling development in the labor market.” She said this practice “may well act as a negative counterweight” to government efforts to get people back to work. Women, particularly older women and those in non-traditional occupations, are disproportionately affected by this restriction, Goss Graves testified.
“At a moment when we all should be doing whatever we can to open up job opportunities to the unemployed, it is profoundly disturbing that the trend of deliberately excluding the jobless from work opportunities is on the rise,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. Owens presented statistical evidence and recounted stories unemployed workers have shared where they were told directly that they would not be considered for employment due to being unemployed.