EEOC Reaches Settlement in Yet Another 'No Americans Need Apply' Case
By Jason Richwine on May 11, 2021
When Michael McLaughlin applied to be a driver for Helados La Tapatia, a frozen-dessert producer in California, the hiring manager allegedly warned him that the company rarely hires non-Hispanics. The manager “had to pull a lot strings” to get McLaughlin on board, but the employment didn’t last. Despite a spotless training record, McLaughlin was quickly fired by the company’s president for not speaking Spanish. There was no indication that Spanish was necessary to perform his job, but the company allegedly used the language requirement as a means to avoid non-Hispanics.
McLaughlin was one of several non-Hispanic whites and blacks who were named plaintiffs in a case brought against Helados La Tapatia by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC alleged that among the company’s 475 hires over a four-year period, only 12 were white, and just two were black. In response to the EEOC lawsuit, the company recently agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, compensate the plaintiffs, and change its hiring practices.
The lawsuit against Helados La Tapatia is the latest in a long string of immigrant- or Hispanic-preference EEOC cases that I documented in a 2019 CIS report, entitled “No Americans Need Apply: EEOC lawsuits reveal how employers are eager to replace low-skill native workers with immigrants”. Although this most recent case was not about favoring immigrants per se, one can infer that immigrants received an advantage, given that 57 percent of California’s working-class Hispanics are foreign-born. In other EEOC cases, the anti-native bias is more explicit. Here is an excerpt from the CIS report:
https://cis.org/Richwine/EEOC-Reaches-Settlement-Yet-Another-No-Americans-Need-Apply-Case
