Was ‘on the fly’ promotion decision biased against qualified minority employee?
August 6, 2009 by Sam NarisiPosted in: In This Week's E-Newsletter, Latest News & Views, Law, Promoting
When promotions are handed out, managers are already familiar with employees’ work, so there’s no need to set up a formal evaluation process, right? Wrong.
When a plant manager job opened up at a dry-ice producer, the boss hand-picked a replacement — a white male employee — from within the company. The vacancy wasn’t posted, and no applications from other interested employees were taken.
When an African-American employee found out about his co-worker’s promotion, he complained. The promoted employee had only been with the company for three years, while the African-American worker had 15 years of experience in the plant. He said he was more qualified than the new plant manager.
When the complaints were ignored, he took them to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who filed a lawsuit on his behalf. Failing to have the case tossed, the company agreed to pay $40,000 to settle.
Cite: EEOC v. Airgas Carbonic, Inc.
Tags: Airgas Carbonic, discrimination, EEOC, promotion
August 7th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Way to go. It is such a shame when all employees do not get the chance to express interest in vacant positions within their companies. Shame on this employer.
August 14th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
This is horrible. I agree job should be posted, but just because someone has worked at a copmany longer doesn’t make them more qualified for a job. Whatever happened to performance based promotion?
August 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I think the EEOC’s ruling is more about the fact that the company did not use a fair screening process to determine the most qualified candidate. I would imagine that the since the company could not provide an affirmative defense (such as a well thought out screening process) for their actions, that is why it went the way it did.
August 15th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
I think an open position should be posted, however to claim racism is bs.