Company sued for allegedly favoring Spanish-speaking Hispanics in hiring

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sued Champion Fiberglass, a manufacturing company in Spring, for allegedly preferring to hire Spanish-speaking Hispanics as laborers.

The alleged hiring practice excluded non-Hispanics from the job openings, according to a lawsuit the EEOC filed Thursday in federal court in Houston.

The lawsuit is on behalf of Freddie Foster, a black man who was denied a job because he doesn’t speak Spanish, and other non-Hispanic job applicants affected by the company’s allegedly discriminatory hiring practices. Champion Fiberglass makes fiberglass conduit that is used to make bridges, stadiums and dams. Company officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The EEOC settled a similar Hispanics-only hiring case last year for $1 million against Lawler Foods, a commercial bakery in Humble. The agency accused the bakery of favoring Hispanic workers and telling black, white and other applicants it would not hire them. The company was able to create a Hispanic-dominated workforce for its production line by relying on Hispanic employees to recruit friends and family, and advertising for Spanish speakers when the company had openings, according to the EEOC lawsuit.

The EEOC focused on the same type of exclusionary hiring practices in its race and national origin case against Champion Fiberglass. Connie Wilhite Gatlin, the EEOC lawyer in charge of the case, said Foster applied for a job after seeing a “Help Wanted” sign in the window of Champion

Fiberglass but company officials wouldn’t give him an application because he doesn’t speak Spanish.

Foster filed a discrimination charge with the EEOC in 2013. During its investigation, the EEOC found that of the 81 laborers at Champion Fiberglass, 77 were Hispanic, three were Asian and one was white, non-Hispanic, Gatlin said.

The plant is located near a residential community made up primarily of non-Hispanic whites and blacks, she said. It is not a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.

The company uses word-of-mouth recruiting from an almost exclusively Hispanic workforce to fill openings with the “full knowledge that the practice has perpetuated an applicant pool and a laborer workforce that are almost entirely Hispanic and Spanish-speaking,” according to the lawsuit. The jobs pay between $8.25 an hour and $14.35 an hour.

Houston employment lawyer Marlene Williams said the EEOC is focused more on hiring complaints and cases that involve large groups of workers. One area of recent EEOC interest, said Williams, who represents employers, is the way companies use background criteria such as criminal records when hiring.

The EEOC is seeking a court order to require Champion Fiberglass to provide equal employment opportunities for non-Hispanics, back pay to qualified applicants who were denied positions and other damages.

The EEOC is seeking a court order to require equal employment opportunities for non-Hispanics.