City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the council would soon override a veto by Mayer Bloomberg. The measure, once pased, will ban job ads that say unemployed applicants won’t qualify and let rejected applicants sue employers.
New Jersey, Oregon and Washington, D.C., have passed unemployment-discrimination laws. But California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed one last fall, and similar proposals have stalled in more than a dozen other states and Congress.
Opponents, including the Mayor, say that hiring is too complicated to allow it to be handled by the courts. Bloomberg said “Hiring decisions frequently involve the exercise of independent, subjective judgment about a prospective employee’s likely future performance, and the creation of this ambiguous legal standard will make it harder for employers to make decisions that will benefit their businesses,” he said in a letter explaining his veto decision.
The numbers of ads that ban the unemployed seems to already be small. Another website says that only “more than a dozen” were found in a search of New York City-based job listings. The National Employment Law Project found 150 ads that were restricted.