HR Management & Compliance

Employment Law Tip: Government Crackdown on Race Bias—Tips to Avoid Trouble

Recent statistics from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission show that charges of race discrimination now account for 36 percent of the agency’s private-sector caseload. And now, in light of these figures, the EEOC is putting the spotlight on workplace racial bias.

The EEOC has launched the E-RACE Initiative, designed to raise awareness of and crack down on workplace racial bias. According to the EEOC, the E-RACE program “is designed to improve EEOC’s efforts to ensure workplaces are free of race and color discrimination. Specifically, the EEOC will identify issues, criteria and barriers that contribute to race and color discrimination, explore strategies to improve the administrative processing and the litigation of race and color discrimination claims, and enhance public awareness of race and color discrimination in employment.”


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With the government’s increased focus on race discrimination, now is a good time to make sure you don’t have a problem on your hands. Here are some tips:

  1. Review job advertisements. The EEOC says that employers should not express a racial preference in job advertisements. Employers can and should indicate that they are “equal opportunity employers.”
  2. Use caution with word of mouth referrals. Word-of-mouth recruitment is the practice of using current employees to spread information concerning job vacancies to their family, friends, and acquaintances. Unless your workforce is already racially and ethnically diverse, exclusive reliance on word-of-mouth should be avoided, says the EEOC, because it is likely to create a barrier to equal employment opportunity for racial or ethnic groups that are not already represented in the employer’s workforce.
  3. Broaden recruitment sources. The EEOC advises employers to attempt to recruit from racially diverse sources in order to obtain a racially diverse applicant pool. For example, if your primary recruitment source is a college that has few African-American students, consider adopting other recruitment strategies, such as also recruiting at predominantly African-American colleges, to ensure that your applicant pool reflects the diversity of the qualified labor force.
  4. Watch selction criteria. Most employers know that race or color cannot, except in very restricted circumstances, be used to make employment decisions. Rather, your reasons for selection decisions should be well supported and based on a person’s qualifications for the position. In addition, it is critical to avoid using criteria that disproportionately exclude certain racial groups unless the criteria are valid predictors of successful job performance and meet the employer’s business needs. For example, while certain educational requirements are obviously necessary for some jobs, your requirement could run afoul of the law if it exceeds what is needed to successfully perform the job and disproportionately excludes certain racial groups.

Additional Resources:

The E-Race Initiative

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