First Transit faces suit over hiring policies
Backed by the nation's largest transit unions, a fired bus driver from Oakland, Calif. Tuesday filed a class action lawsuit against downtown Cincinnati-based First Transit, saying the transit company's policy barring individuals with felony convictions is discriminatory against blacks and Hispanics and violates long-standing civil rights laws.
Experts say that the case could change hiring practices for all companies nationally whoever prevails, and could set major labor law precedent.
"It would be enormously significant and could eventually say to all companies in the country, in Ohio and in Cincinnati that these blanket felon bans and their restrictions are unacceptable," said Stephen JohnsonGrove, a lawyer with the downtown-based Ohio Justice and Policy Center, a non-profit law agency that works on labor and civil rights issues regionally and statewide.
First Transit is a subsidiary of downtown-based First Group America, the nation's largest private provider of transit services for public city bus systems as well as public and private school districts, and also owns Greyhound Bus Lines. First Transit specifically handles public transit systems.
The filing joins a handful of similar suits over the last few years, including one filed earlier this year against the U.S. Census Bureau.
The First Transit case involves Adrienne Hudson, an African-American single mother from Oakland, Calif. She was hired and then fired from a First Transit job after it was discovered she had an expunged conviction for welfare fraud on her record seven years prior - a conviction she says she took to stay with her children even though her former boyfriend was the actual culprit.
The Amalgamated Transit Union says that the policy violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which states that employers can't base hiring on a past felony conviction if it would disproportionately impact minority groups. Union officials, who support the case, argue that minorities have disproportionately higher criminal records, and therefore such policies are discriminatory.
"We discovered that the company was taking over other contracts and letting people go, even though federal law requires the new subcontractor to keep the previous hiring policies in place," said Ronald Heintzman, president of the Washington-based Amalgamated Transit Union, which has 190,000 members nationally - including 13,000 at First Transit. "And that led to a pattern of discriminating against blacks and Hispanics for both existing workers as well as new hires."
Class action suit claims employment discrimination by bus company
By Angela Hill
Oakland Tribune
Posted: 07/20/2010 02:58:40 PM PDT
OAKLAND -- An Oakland woman is the lead plaintiff in a federal class action lawsuit against the Ohio-based First Transit bus company, one of several service providers for East Bay Paratransit, claiming the company's hiring policy barring applicants with felony convictions is discriminatory against blacks and Latinos and violates civil rights and fair employment laws.
The complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S District Court in San Francisco on behalf of 44-year-old Adrienne Hudson, is backed by the nation's largest transit unions. It asserts that, because blacks and Latinos have a higher incarceration rate nationally, employment-selection policies based on criminal background checks -- such as First Transit's -- have "a disparate impact on African-American and Latino job applicants and employees."
Officials with the Amalgamated Transit Union, the nation's largest union of mass transit workers, say the policy violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act which states employers can't base hiring on a past felony conviction if it would disproportionately impact minority groups.
In Hudson's case, "This is a person who was convicted many years ago for an offense that is completely unrelated to driving a bus," said Oscar Owens, ATU secretary-treasurer. "She did everything she was asked to do. She served her sentence, she completed her probation, and her conviction was expunged. Seven years later, she's got a good-paying job, she's supporting her family, and you're going to kick her out on the street and bar her from employment? We can't let employers get away with that kind of discriminatory behavior."
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