New York Employment Lawyer Blog

This month, a federal racial discrimination case filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the retailer Target Corp. in Wisconsin concluded with settlement of $510,000 and additional terms.

The EEOC’s suit claimed that in 2000 and 2001,Target improperly denied management jobs to four African-American applicants -three who were not interviewed, and one who had interviewed but did not get the job, despite his testing well on Target’s own leadership ability test. The EEOC also claimed that Target failed to make and preserve records relevant to the determination of whether Target had engaged in unlawful employment practices.

The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin granted Target’s motion for summary judgment. On appeal, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2006 reversed and remanded, finding in its opinion that, although Target revised its record keeping policy, nothing in Target’s new policy clearly prevented bad faith destruction of resumes or other employment application documents. The Court of Appeals also found that, with regard to Target’s decision not to hire the applicant who took the leadership test based on his qualifications, Target presented “an ostensibly objective nondiscriminatory reason but failed to articulate what criteria informed this reason.”

With regard to the other three applicants, the court found that “the EEOC did present sufficient evidence to establish a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Target’s reason for not interviewing [the three applicants] was a pretext for race discrimination,” noting that although Target argued that its hiring manager could not have discriminated against the three applicants because he did not know their race, the EEOC presented evidence that created a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the manager indeed knew the applicants’ race. In a press release, the director of the EEOC’s Chicago District Office said that the appeals court decision was “noteworthy for its ruling that the trial court could admit into evidence expert testimony to the effect that the employer may have racially identified the applicants as African American on the basis of their names or accents heard during telephone conversations.”

Following the U.S. Court of Appeals reversal, the EEOC and Target settled the suit by way of a consent decree. According to the EEOC release, under the 30-month consent decree, Target agreed to pay a total of $510,000 to the four applicants and to revise its document retention policies, provide training to supervisors on employment discrimination and record-keeping; report on hiring decisions, and post a notice about the decree to employees in its District 110 stores and offices.