The National Employment Law Project (NELP) has led advocacy efforts to end hiring practices that discriminate against unemployed job-seekers since issuing its groundbreaking 2011 report, Hiring Discrimination Against the Unemployed.
An October 15th announcement by the administration includes two new handbooks — one for employers (“Guide to Recruiting and Hiring the Long-Term Unemployed”) and one for job-seekers (“New Guide, New Destinations”) — that offer guidance on specific programs and best practices to eliminate unemployment discrimination and increase the hiring of the long-term unemployed.
As part of this new program, the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued a new guidance to federal agencies’ hiring managers to help ensure that unemployed applicants and those who have experienced financial difficulties through no fault of their own are not unfairly denied federal employment opportunities.
For example, the guidance states that “job announcements generally should not include a requirement that applicants be currently or recently employed, which discourages unemployed workers.” And it directs the agencies to include the following language in their outreach material: “It is the policy of the Government not to deny employment simply because an individual has been unemployed or has had financial difficulties that have arisen through no fault of the individual.” In addition, OPM issued a “myth buster” geared to the general public and workers interested in applying for federal employment to help clarify federal hiring policies designed to prevent discrimination against the unemployed.
NELP has been working in the issue of long-term unemployment for some time:
A January 2014 policy brief from NELP — Tackling the Long-Term Unemployment Crisis: What the President, Congress and Business Leaders Should Do — lays out a comprehensive agenda for reducing long-term unemployment, and includes several proposals closely mirrored in the administration’s initiative.
Despite receding from the headlines, the crisis of long-term unemployment — the defining feature and legacy of the Great Recession — persists for many Americans. At nearly three million, there are still more long-term unemployed than at the peak of all prior post-war recessions. That comparison also holds true for the percentage of the unemployed out of work for 27 weeks or longer (31.9 percent in Sept. 2014) and for the average duration of joblessness (31.5 weeks).
This year has been especially difficult for the long-term unemployed, as they have been cut off from federal extensions of jobless aid as a result of Congress’s failure to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program at the end of 2013.
NELP called for the administration’s initiatives to be scaled up nationally, along with additional programs and funding to provide high-quality, personalized reemployment services as well as subsidized jobs for those long-term unemployed workers who need them. It also called for measures to help prevent long-term unemployment, including rapid-response-type job-matching and placement services early in the job search, and legislation to prohibit employment discrimination based on an individual’s unemployed status.
Wisconsin Unemployment 