Black Chicago Firefighters To Receive Compensation, New Jobs

Court Order Demands City Rehire, Compensate Jilted Black Firefighters

An expected court ruling will force the city of Chicago to hire more than 100 black firefighters and pay millions to others who were unfairly denied employment based on a 1995 aptitude test, the the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday.

Judge Joan Gotschall is expected to approve the order requiring the city to hire 111 black firefighters who were bypassed following a 1995 hiring procedure that a federal judge found to be racially discriminatory in 2005. The job appointments, and at least $30 million in damages owed to about 6,000 applicants denied employment, must be completed by March 2012.

These measures were determined by a federal appeals court ruling in May following a Supreme Court ruling last year that validated the firefighters’ claims. The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the city’s hiring procedure, which required applicants to take an aptitude test and hired randomly from a pool of scores above 89, unfairly excluded 89 percent of black applicants who earned a lower score and then heavily diluted the chances of the 11 percent that passed from being randomly hired. 78 percent of the applicants hired from that pool were white, the Sun-Times reports.

The court order would require the city to send postcards to all 6,000 black candidates bypassed in 1995 offering them a chance to enter a “job lottery” that will select 750 candidates to begin a series of physical, background and medical examinations and 111 will be hired. The maximum age requirement of 38 will be waived for applicants who qualified in 1995.

Chicago taxpayers will be liable for $10 to $20 million in back pension contributions for new hires, as well as $500,000 in back pay for every month the hiring is delayed and cash awards of at least $5,000 per applicant who does not reapply for the lottery, the Network Journal reports.

Flickr photo by AMagill.

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