Officially becoming apart of the workforce can be a very exciting and stressful for time for anyone. Finding the perfect job or even getting your feet wet can be slightly diffcult at a time were jobs are not so easy to snag. In Chicago, it is being reported that a staffing agency is facing a lawsuit for favoring one ethnic group over the other.
According to FOX News Latino, five African-American men from Chicago filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday alleging that a temporary job staffing company discriminated against them in favor of Hispanic applicants.
According to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the site reports that the agency, MVP Staffing, used coded language to weed out African-American applicants from Hispanic at the behest of corporate clients who refused to hire them.
"When we started looking into these cases, early on, we found that almost 98.2 percent of the applicants placed in jobs at one client company, for example, were Latino," Christopher Williams of the Workers' Law Office, the plaintiff's lead trial attorney, told the site.
The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action status, contains statements from former MVP employees, including Rosa Ceja, 29, who was an on-site manager at one of MVP's companies in Elmwood Park, Illinois.
According to The Chicago Tribune Ceja reveals "I know that certain clients of MVP do not want African-Americans assigned to work at their company and that MVP has a policy of accommodating these requests," Ceja said in her statement. She added that she had been "yelled at” when she assigned black workers to a client.
Court documents also show that the staffing agency used certain phrases to identify specific workers. Latino workers were described as "feos" meaning ugly ones, Ceja said, while black workers were "guapos" meaning handsome ones or, according to the court filings, "pretty boys -- ones who don't want to do dirty work.
Pamela Sanchez, another MVP employee, said in her testimony that she was instructed directly by a bakery not to send black workers.
She said in a statement that she would review the names of potential workers to be sent for a shift, but if their names didn’t sound Hispanic, she would overlook them, knowing they would be sent back. Sanchez also stated that she was instructed to have black applicants undergo criminal background checks, while Hispanics weren't required to.
The lawsuit includes eight counts of racial discrimination against MVP Staffing.
Ceja was forced out of the company in 2014 after complaining about sexual harassment by an MVP van driver, the Tribune reported. While he recently was convicted of battery against her, MVP contends that Ceja voluntarily abandoned her position.
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