Pepsi suffers $3.1 million shakedown for 'discriminatory' hiring policies
By David Paulin
The American Thinker
January 12, 2012
Pepsi Beverages Co. has agreed to a $3.1 million settlement to end federal charges of racial discrimination over its hiring practices - but this wasn't the sort of discrimination that once existed in the Jim Crow South. Pepsi was guilty of racial discrimination as defined by government bullies at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Increasingly, the EEOC has used the battering ram of discrimination, as it loosely defines it, to promote "diversity" at all cost. And no matter if this means sacrificing the concept of meritocracy (critical to free-markets and democracy) for the sake of their ideological agenda.
So what was Pepsi's sin as defined by EEOC bureaucrats and their liberal cheerleaders? Pepsi had administered the same pre-employment screening to all job applicants regardless of their race, color, or creed. Specifically, Pepsi used criminal background checks to screen job seekers -- something it presumably did to measure the content of every job applicant's character. Applicants with arrest records (though not necessarily convictions) were disqualified, and Pepsi also turned away applicants convicted of minor offenses.
The trouble was that the background checks were, according to the EEOC, disqualifying higher numbers of blacks than whites because - well - more blacks applying to Pepsi had higher numbers of arrests! Or as the Associated Press noted in an article: the EEOC said Pepsi's discriminatory background checks "can limit job opportunities for minorities with higher arrest and conviction rates than whites." ...
Remainder of the article @ http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/01/pepsi_suffers_31_million_shakedown_for_discriminatory_hiring_policies.html#ixzz1jGTXV17x
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence