From the Star Tribune, January 11, 2012:
Pepsi Beverages will pay $3.13 million and provide job offers and training to resolve a race discrimination charge filed in the Minneapolis office of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), government officials said Wednesday.
The settlement will be divided among 300 black job applicants who had applied for positions at Pepsi between 2006 and 2010. A portion of the settlement will go toward covering claims processing costs.
EEOC officials said in a statement Wednesday that their investigation found "reasonable cause to believe that the criminal background check policy formerly used by Pepsi discriminated against African Americans in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
Pepsi Beverages, formerly known as Pepsi Bottling Group, reportedly applied a criminal background check policy that "disproportionately excluded black applicants from permanent employment," the EEOC document said.
Under Pepsi's former policy, job applicants who had been arrested but were never convicted of any offense were not allowed to be hired for any permanent jobs at the factory.
EEOC officials also said that Pepsi's former policy also denied employment to applicants who had been arrested or convicted of minor offenses.
While officials said that the use of arrest and conviction records to deny employment "can be legal" under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it is not legal when the records are not relevant for the job because it can limit the employment opportunities of applicants or workers based on their race or ethnicity.
EEOC Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien said that the agency has a longstanding policy on the use of arrest and conviction records in employment. She went on to commend Pepsi's "willingness to re-examine its policy and modify it to ensure that unwarranted roadblocks to employment are removed."
Minneapolis EEOC spokeswoman Julie Schmid said she has never seen a conciliation agreement that large in Minneapolis the six years she has worked at the agency. "For our district, this is unusually large," she said.
The settlement is also "unusual," she said because Pepsi not only agreed to pay the cash, but agreed to offer previously affected black applicants jobs. "Usually the settlement just involves money. So this is unusual," she said.
Dee DePass • 612-673-7725
