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Comment by hlieberman | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: in some jurisdictions such as New York and DC, this is illegal. It's called "discrimination against the unemployed". Check the laws of your state, the state you would work in, and the state the company is headquartered in to see if this may apply to you.

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While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it? The company proved it has a terrible culture. Doesn't seem worth it to fight for a job with them.

Assuming sufficient evidence, one could have an employment attorney pursue the claim and let the attorney keep any damages awarded beyond their contingency fee. Negative stimuli may not improve the culture, but it may improve the discriminatory HR behavior. And even if the behavior isn’t improved, there is then a mostly immutable public record of said discriminatory behavior (which is arguably more valuable than whatever scuttlebutt is on Blind or similar platforms).

It might even be demonstrably securities fraud.

https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2022/06/22/can-sec...

This would be a deeply important change you'd provoke.

Much greater incentive to absolutely silent rejection. You know nothing you can't sue.

Possibly, in which case someone on the inside would have to be incentivized to be a whistleblower, either due to moral or financial considerations if silent rejections were covering up the illegal activity. With that said, people are lazy, they slip up or they become demoralized, disgruntled, and comfortable with spilling the beans. More so in a volatile macro with layoffs compressing more work amongst less staff.

TLDR Have your paper trail in order if you suspect illegal behavior, everything else is then logistics with counsel and/or regulators.

(not an attorney, not your attorney)

Whistheblowing is a red flag, and you can be sure this is a matter of public enough record for them to know

for the nyc one, you can claim remedy yourself in civil court.

walk them right into small claims for 25k

New tech job challenge: find 20 companies a year whose HR departments are populated by dirtbags, make Google money.

I like to think that it’s not always a direct individual outcome that helps. With enough soft complaints the regulator might write a reminder letter to the given HR dept which could go over relevant law and warn about repercussions of breaking it. And that might be enough to straighten out some practices.

This feels much too light to me. I'm not sure I can think of a worse thing to do to someone while interviewing them than discriminate against them based on a protected status, outside of proper criminal things.

Discrimination (including "unemployment discrimination") during interviewing should be an automatic, hefty fine, with a significant portion going to the target of the discrimination (assuming the claim is found to be valid). Just riffing, maybe set the fine to something like the equivalent of total yearly compensation package for the average employee in the position being sought. That would be penalty enough to encourage putting it right in the front of any training for anyone making offers, particularly HR.

If you have financial obligations, sometimes you have to take the job that's available.

"While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it?"

This is exactly how I feel about tenant laws in the US. It's great they exist, but who's going to get a lawyer to stay somewhere they aren't wanted. All these laws that protect the vulnerable still require a lawyer to enforce them. Lawyers aren't accessible to most.

For what it's worth, Washington, DC, has an Office of the Tenant Advocate.

It does seem worth to sue them and get a settlement

I just glanced at their career page and all the US based engineering and product management jobs are in the bay area. California doesn't have protected status for being unemployed.

It is very weird that your precise case has to fit a couple of narrow criteria to be protected against discrimination in the US. From a moral perspective, discrimination is discrimination regardless of its grounds. The default position should be that it is illegal. This would avoid endless sterile discussion about whether this or that is a protected class.

Job requirements "discriminate" and narrow the candidate pool. Also only one state considers it a protected class. Compare that to sexual preference which 29 states consider protected. Being able to cut candidates if they were involuntarily cut from their job isn't high on my morality list compared to other social issues.

So all hiring, all decision-making about people would be presumed illegal, until proven to be based on unprotected characteristics? Sounds.. inconvenient? Not how the law generally works?

Well, not really, it just means that grounds for rejection come from inadequacies between the applicants and the role, not because of the recruiter’s prejudice. I know how the law works in the US, that was more or less the point. The fact that it works like that in one country or several does not mean that it is just, moral, or natural. Non-discrimination should be the default state. It’s like a legal system where you would need freedoms to be explicitly granted, which is counter to our common definition of liberty (along the lines of “rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others”). By narrowing down the definition of illegal discrimination, one gives more power to the people who are already in a position of power and so one keep pushing the status quo away from equal rights.

This is the language in the universal declaration of human right: “everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status”. This is not US law, but the fact that this was written and accepted by the vast majority of the countries on earth at least indicates that we (including nominally the US government) tend to hold that discrimination itself is morally wrong, regardless of whether the reason was put on a list or not. So it is not an unimaginable concept.

The problem is that 'discrimination' is exactly what you're trying to do in sifting job applicants, for example. Not unduly prejudiced discrimination, but you need to discriminate somehow.

I'm not all that familiar with US law fwiw, but I understand there's a concept of 'protected characteristics' very similar to here in the UK & EU countries. I don't really see that there's any other way of doing it - you have to use something - if you're not allowed anything then you can only pick randomly. (You may as well take the first applicant, except maybe that's not allowed either because it discriminates against slower applicants.)

People have different morals, and states in the US are like mini-countries with their own laws. So it makes sense

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