Walmart Hit with Class Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Racial Discrimination in Hiring Process

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges that Walmart’s hiring practices are discriminatory and exclusionary toward Black men with criminal records.

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According to the 23-page lawsuit, the Elwood, Illinois Walmart distribution center is a key cog of the retail giant’s operations in the Midwest. For several years, the case says, all employees at the distribution center were employees of Schneider Logistics, a company contracted by Walmart for services that included transporting, organizing and performing quality assurance checks on Walmart goods.

In early 2019, the suit relays, Walmart ended its partnership with Schneider Logistics and announced that it would be taking direct control and management of the Elwood distribution center. Any of the approximately 600 employees who wished to continue their employment at the distribution center, according to the company announcement, would have to reapply to Walmart directly, the process for which included a criminal background check, the filing says.

Per the case, Walmart stated that they wished to hire “as many people as possible” of the roughly 600 former Schneider employees at the distribution center.

The lawsuit’s lead plaintiffs are formerly incarcerated Black men who had been working at the distribution center through Schneider Logistics without incident for two and three years, respectively, at the time of the management turnover, the complaint states. At the point when Walmart took over for Schneider, one plaintiff’s criminal record was over a decade old, while the other’s was mostly over a decade old, barring two minor misdemeanor offenses.

When Walmart took over the operation and management of the Elwood, Illinois distribution center, both plaintiffs reapplied for their previous positions, along with many other employees, including several with criminal records, the suit says. However, the lawsuit claims that the plaintiffs and several other former Schneider Logistics employees were either denied employment or had an offer of employment quickly revoked due to their criminal records, regardless of their qualifications for and performance at the same job under Schneider management.

“The experience of the Plaintiffs and class members in this case is illustrative of the harms of discriminatory record checks and the absurdity of justifications for their use based on ‘business necessity,’” the class action lawsuit charges.

The lawsuit argues that these “overly restrictive” criminal background checks, which allegedly lacked “meaningful individual assessment of applicants’ criminal records” or adequate consideration for qualifications and prior job performance and experience, amount to a discriminatory practice that disproportionately affected Black applicants, who the lawsuit states are statistically more likely to possess a criminal record than their non-Black counterparts in the U.S.

Additionally, the complaint contends that Walmart’s background check procedure, which requires an applicant to self-disclose any criminal record in addition to consenting to a third-party background check, has a disproportionate, disparate impact on Black applicants. The lawsuit argues that because Black applicants are statistically more likely to possess criminal histories, they are more likely to “fail” the “memory or integrity test” for which the self-disclosure is supposedly used.

Per the complaint, research has also found that 60 percent of Black applicants with criminal records do not receive callbacks and job offers following an application, while only 30 percent of white applicants with criminal records receive no callbacks or offers. This statistic, the lawsuit claims, was broadly represented in Walmart’s hiring decisions at the Elwood distribution center, where non-Black applicants with criminal records were supposedly re-hired for their positions without issue, even after undergoing the same criminal background check practices.

The Walmart class action lawsuit alleges that approximately 50 qualified Black applicants who had formerly worked at the Walmart distribution center under Schneider Logistics management were denied employment due to the retailer’s allegedly racially discriminatory hiring practices.

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