Making jobless applicants a new protected class?

A plaintiff’s-oriented group crusading for such legislation managed to come up with only a relative handful of employer advertisements exhibiting supposed bias against the unemployed. And on scrutiny not all of those ads turned out in fact to be “exclusionary”:

For example, national recruiter Kelly Services placed the following ad in the St. Louis area: “Currently employed but lacking growth in terms of responsibilities and technical proficiencies? If so, Kelly IT Resources-St. Louis wants to talk to you!” NELP zeroed in on “currently employed,” counted it as discriminatory, and ignored the rest of the posting. Common sense dictates that marketing to the currently employed looking to advance does not signal a rejection of the unemployed.

[Michael Saltsman, Wall Street Journal, earlier here, etc.]

2 Comments

  • I don’t think this is an idea being tossed around by many.

  • “Common sense dictates that marketing to the currently employed looking to advance does not signal a rejection of the unemployed.”

    Seems to me that it does. Kelly states in plain language that it is seeking a c ategory of currently employed persons. How are the unemployed included in the advertisement.?

    How about if the ad read “If you are a college graduate, not challenged by present position? kelly wants to talk to you.”

    Does that indicate Kelly wants to talk to high school dropouts, HS grads, college graduates or all three? To me it states plainly that they are interested only in talking to college grads.