In the news:

• Lawsuit filed after a 58-year-old job applicant was allegedly told the employer was looking for someone "not quite so old and with as much experience."
• Transsexual allegedly told she would not be a "good fit."
• Restaurant allegedly refuses to accommodate an Islamic headdress.

The company now known as Altria Group (previously Philip Morris Companies) has been slapped with an age-discrimination lawsuit alleging that firings, hirings, and promotions within Philip Morris illegally considered the ages of candidates and employees.

The lawsuit against Altria Group and Philip Morris International alleges that at career development meetings, the company's HR department presented PowerPoint slides listing individual employees' birthdates and depicting the average age of the Brand Integrity department workforce versus the average age of other employees.

Further, the complaint alleges that senior management referred to older employees as "blockers."

The employment law firm Broach & Stulberg has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the company.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of D'Arcy Quinn, 52, the former Philip Morris Brand Integrity Director for Central and Eastern Europe. Quinn served as in-house counsel for international anti-counterfeiting and anti-smuggling matters concerning Marlboro and L&M cigarettes.

"Despite his excellent job performance, Mr. Quinn's career was undermined by virulent age discrimination, evidenced by explicit personnel policies, corporate practices, and statements of high-level executives," says Robert B. Stulberg, a partner at Broach & Stulberg.

"Blatant age discrimination has been standard operating procedure at these companies. Mr. Quinn was discharged when he opposed these illegal acts," says Stulberg.

However, Altria Group remains tight-lipped on the alleged age discrimination.

"We are not going to have any comment on that case," says John Sorrells, an external communications spokesman for Altria Corporate Services.

While multi-tiered and complex, there are certain staffing-related elements of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act that recruiters and staffing departments nationwide should monitor.

The pending immigration legislation would do many things, including the hiring of thousands of additional border patrol agents; instituting the new "Z" worker visa; and adopting new deportation provisions.

Perhaps the most interesting element for the staffing world is Title III, which would create a mandatory employment eligibility verification system to electronically verify the eligibility of every worker in the country.

Title III touches on document verification requirements; records that must be kept by employers; protections against discrimination; ID theft prevention and privacy protections; information sharing; and other miscellaneous policies.

According to the pending legislation, Title III "would make it unlawful for an employer to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, or continue to employ, an alien for employment in the United States knowing, or with reckless disregard, that the alien is unauthorized to work."

In essence, this employment verification system would determine whether an individual's identity and employment eligibility is consistent with the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records.

Yet Jim Babka, co-founder of Downsize DC, says database errors might find "tens of thousands caught in a system where there is an error holding them back from employment, and they'll have to deal with the customer service from hell in the bowels of Washington, DC."

This also means that for employers who do find desirable candidates, "a red-tape snafu might hold up that hiring," says Babka.

Verify, Verify, Verify

The main issue is to really confirm that everyone is qualified, according to Robert Meltzer, chief executive officer of VisaNow.

Meltzer urges companies to take verification very seriously, noting that "hiring departments can't go through the old verification process; now they have to make sure it's not a bogus Social Security card," he says.

Beyond streamlining how best to investigate workers' documents, he also says companies need to take the time to create all required policies.

One such policy change would require employers to retain copies of documents related to verifications and any correspondence relating to an employee's identity or employment eligibility.

In addition, the legislation would require every employer to submit employee data for new hires to the federal employment verification system. (The system would start out on a voluntary basis until mandatory participation is required.)

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Last week the 109th session of Congress paved the way to renew the Work Opportunity and Welfare-to-Work tax credits with a sweeping bill reviving many previously shelved bills.

"Certainly, this is a great thing," says Beth Henricks, president of the First Advantage Tax Consulting Services Division, which offers domestic and international recruiting services, applicant tracking software, skills assessments and testing, and tax credits screening.

"The business community had been told by Congress they would extend this; it's a welcome piece of legislation," says Henricks.

The tax credit, which had expired at the end of 2005, provides an incentive to employers to hire individuals from the following eight groups.

• families eligible to receive benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program
• high-risk youth
• qualified ex-felons
• vocational rehabilitation referrals
• qualified summer-youth employees (max credit of $1,200, or 40% of the first $3,000 of qualified first-year wages)
• qualified veterans
• families receiving food stamps
• persons receiving certain Supplemental Security Income benefits

If a company is interested in participating in this program, they need to use federal Form 8850 as part of all screening and application systems.

"In a more automated world, companies will [automatically] incorporate those screening questions," Henricks says.

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A new survey of U.S. corporate law departments by Fulbright & Jaworski found that across 13 industries, labor and employment disputes appear to be the most common denominator.

In its third annual survey of corporate litigation trends, with data compiled from 422 in-house law departments worldwide, including 311 companies in the United States, Fulbright says the typical U.S. company faces an average of 305 pending lawsuits internationally. 

For large U.S. companies, or those with $1 billion or more in annual gross revenue, the number of lawsuits increased to 556 cases, the data shows.
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As special interests pressure the U.S. Senate to lift the cap on H-1B visas, a computer programmer advocacy group is filing complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice against more than 300 IT services employers whose 'Help Wanted' ads it believes discriminate against American citizens, denying workers here equal access to U.S. jobs.

The Summit, New Jersey-based Programmers Guild is filing employment discrimination claims with the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related discrimination. The complaints allege that the companies have discriminated against U.S. citizens and permanent residents in job postings that express preference towards hiring foreign workers on H-1B, L-1, or student visas.

John Miano, who founded the Programmers Guild in 1998, is filing the cases because he says there has been a major lack of oversight by the federal government regarding some employers' openly favoring foreign workers over American workers.

"Abuse of the H-1B program has become so widespread that companies apparently feel free to engage openly in the practice. And we are only reviewing ads for computer programmers," Miano says.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, U.S. workers -- those legally entitled to work in the United States -- are a protected class, and it is illegal to discriminate against U.S. workers on the basis of immigration status.

The Law Offices of Rajiv S. Khanna posted a warning to employers on its website to stop running such ads, bolstering the legitimacy of the Guild's charges: "We are representing some employers who have recently been served with a notice by the U.S. Department of Justice for investigation regarding discrimination against U.S. citizens. The charges allege that these employers placed ads inviting only non-immigrants to apply. Please stop all such advertising," the online warning stated.

Miano cites examples from actual postings on Dice.com and Monster.com:

"We offer H1B services for L1 Visa Holders and new H1B for the right candidates in India."

"H1B -From India-Multiple positions"

"We require candidates for H1B from India."

"ONLY OPT STUDENTS NEED APPLY"

"We sponsor GC [green card] and we do prefer H1B holders"

In addition to this "Americans need not apply" discrimination, Miano says, many H-1B job postings are for employment arrangements that amount to the sale of visas and green cards.

"We have postings for arrangements where the 'employee' finds his own work and the 'employer' takes a cut of the earnings," Miano says. Many "high-tech companies" obtaining H-1B visas, he adds, "operate out of apartments and Mailboxes Etc." 

Two out of five companies do not disclose employee diversity information, according to a survey of 3,100 senior human resources executives by Novations Group, a consulting and training organization based in Boston.

Thirty-eight percent of companies regard their diversity metrics as proprietary and keep them confidential, while 35% provide such data just to concerned groups, such as employees, vendors, or customers. Only 26% of employers make their diversity recruiting and workforce inclusion data public.

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Members of the Society for Human Resource Management have plenty of business in Washington regardless of whether they've traveled to the nation's capital this week to attend its annual conference.

The society's governmental affairs unit is mobilizing members to get involved in the growing immigration debate before a new law could force employers to screen individuals they wish to recruit against a flawed federal employment verification database. keep reading...

Besides a donut and coffee, Boston-area customers of Dunkin Donuts are getting a reminder that the simmering nationwide debate over illegal immigration is starting to become every employer’s business. Some customers are now being greeted by signs that read: “We follow the law! This company hires lawful workers only.”

Dunkin’ Brands, the parent company of Dunkin Donuts, has announced that it now requires all 5,000 of its U.S. franchisees to participate in the government’s Basic Pilot program, a voluntary federal program that enables employers to tap online databases from the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to quickly verify whether new recruits can work legally in this country.

While only 6,200 of the nation’s 8 million employers have signed up for the program so far, rising interest in the program suggests that more employers want to avoid hiring illegal workers and the hefty fines that could result from doing so. Some simply want to address consumer assumptions that workers who speak English as a second language are illegal workers.
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The U.S. Congress may extend, retroactively, tax credits popular among entry-level employers like UPS, Federated, Wal-Mart, FedEx, and many restaurants such as Pizza Hut.

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