Eeoc To Send ‘Testers’ Out On Job Interviews Commission Hopes To End Discrimination In Hiring Practices

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced that it will employ undercover “testers” in two pilot projects to detect discrimination in hiring, particularly at the entry level.

In announcing that the commission will take a more active role in ferreting out job discrimination, officials said the need for such testers had increased because new welfareto-work laws were bringing a large number of new employees, many of them minorities and women, into the marketplace.

The practice of using testers - people who have equivalent qualifications but who differ in characteristics like race - is a long-standing one in civil rights law, particularly in the areas of housing and money-lending. The Supreme Court upheld the use of testers in 1982 in housing-discrimination cases.

But the technique has been used less often to establish hiring discrimination, a complex arena in which it can be difficult to prove bias because hiring can be so subjective.

The commission said it had let contracts to two private groups - the Fair Employment Council of Greater Washington and the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago - for a combined total of $200,000 to “study the use of employment testers to detect hiring discrimination.”

The commission, which is the federal agency responsible for prosecuting discrimination cases, said in 1990 that it would consider claims of job discrimination originating with testers, and called on civil rights groups to use the practice more.

And again in 1991, the commission chairman, Evan J. Kemp Jr., repeated that the agency had received so many allegations of employment discrimination that it would accept charges from civil rights groups that used testers to uncover discrimination.

But the commission’s announcement, made on Friday, that it would pay for pilot projects with testers marked its first active entry into the field of hiring.

Gilbert Casellas, chairman of the bipartisan commission, which unanimously supported the action, said in a statement, “If we can shed light on barriers to fair hiring in entry-level jobs, which are the gateway to self-sufficiency and economic independence, we will have made an important step in assuring equal opportunity for everyone.”

Civil rights analysts hailed the move.

“It’s about time,” said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington-based group that frequently prosecutes such cases. “Our long experience in fair housing has demonstrated repeatedly that testing is one of the most effective methodologies that you can use to expose racial stereotypes.”

But other legal experts said they expected employers to challenge the legality of testers in job cases, just as landlords challenged the legality of testers in housing cases. Testers who pose for jobs or housing can create questions of entrapment, and employers can contend that applicants who are turned down are not harmed - because they are only testers and not, in reality, people seeking jobs.