Law, Business, and Society 9th Edition by Tony McAdams

Exercise 47

Eighty-one percent of the hires at Consolidated Service Systems, a small Chicago janitorial company, were of Korean origin. The EEOC brought a disparate treatment claim, saying the firm discriminated in favor of Koreans by relying primarily on word-of-mouth recruiting. Hwang, the owner, is Korean. Seventy-three percent of the job applicants were Korean. One percent of the Chicago-area workforce is Korean, and not more than 3 percent of the janitorial workforce for the area is Korean. The court found no persuasive evidence of intentional discrimination, although the government claimed that 99 applicants were denied jobs because they were not Koreans.
a. Does restricting hiring to members of one ethnic group constitute discrimination where hiring is accomplished by word of mouth Explain.
b. What if a firm, using the word-of-mouth approach, hired only white applicants Explain.
c. In this case, the EEOC brought but dropped a disparate impact claim. Analyze the case using the disparate impact test. See Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Consolidated Service Systems, 989 F.2d 233 (7th Cir. 1993).