Where do these corporations get the nerve?
When Citizen Action’s Policy Director Bob Cohen brought the “unemployment discrimination” issue up at our last staff gathering, I almost fell off my chair. The more I read more about it, the more infuriated I become!
Have you heard about this? Corporations are putting in their job listings that you must be currently employed in order to apply for a new job. Are you kidding me!?
I recently wrote about our brothers and sisters at CWA on strike, and the assault on the working class. Learning more about this discriminatory practice is the icing on the cake. If you aren’t fired up and ready to go – give me a call and I will get you there.
Just in case you need the details, check out last week’s Huffington Post article on the issue.
Fortunately, groups are working on stopping this ridiculous practice. Citizen Action of New York’s national affiliate USAction, with its partners at True Majority, have collected some 47,000 names on a petition to many of the companies who practice unemployment discrimination. This work is being noticed.
Practices like unemployment discrimination are an especially hard blow to African American and Latino communities, which suffer from even higher rates of unemployment than whites.
New Jersey outlawed this particular kind of discrimination against unemployed workers in their state last legislative session, and there is growing support at the federal level to outlaw this practice, too. Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Hank Johnson (D-GA) have introduced H.R. 2501, the Fair Opportunity Employment Act. On August 2, Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and our very own Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) introduced the Senate version of the bill, S. 1471.
We can take a state approach here in New York, too. Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins introduced a state version of a bill banning this practice back in May. The legislation was introduced by Assemblyman Keith Wright in that house.
As mystified as I am that corporations think that they can get away with this, they do. And unjust practices like this mean that many of the jobs that are available to the people of our state and nation are actually not. I hope that all of the previously mentioned legislators and the advocates working on this issue join me in pushing a much larger jobs package in New York and America. Eliminating unemployment discrimination is critical, but adding millions of new, living wage jobs for all of our unemployed to have is as critical, if not more so.
The article featured in yesterday’s New York Times is right. A massive jobs program, like Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky’s, is needed every day more desperately than the last. Join Citizen Action in its fight for working people! We need your commitment and your action in the coming weeks and months as the fight for good jobs continues.