The Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit said applicants to the Kroger-owned chain, with more than 25,000 employees, lost job offers based on a single misdemeanor count of excessive noise, simple cannabis convictions, and other convictions that have no adverse relationship with the duties of working at a grocery store. The suit is the first filed alleging Fair Chance Act violations.
The Fair Chance Act generally prohibits employers with five or more employees from asking about a job applicant’s conviction history before making a conditional job offer, the California Civil Rights Department suit said.
“Ralphs all but ignored the law following the passage of the Fair Chance Act, violating both its procedural and substantive requirements for years,” the lawsuit said. “As a result, more than a thousand applicants have been denied a fair chance to work at Ralphs: they have been denied their procedural rights under the law to make their case regarding their conviction histories, and they have been denied employment at Ralphs based on conviction histories that do not have a direct and adverse relationship with the duties of the job.”
The 2018 law requires specific procedures for considering an applicant’s criminal history after a conditional job offer, and limits convictions that employers can consider disqualifying to those that have a direct relationship with job responsibilities.
“We can’t expect people to magically gain the economic and housing stability needed to reintegrate into their communities and stay out of the criminal legal system without a fair chance at steady employment, particularly when the job has nothing to do with a past offense,” CRD Director Kevin Kish said in a statement. “Ralphs has continued to unlawfully deny jobs to qualified candidates and that’s why we’re taking them to court.”
Complaints, Mediation
Three complaints, the first in 2020, led the state agency to begin a class-wide investigation of the chain. At the end of the probe, the lawsuit said, the parties participated in four mediation sessions with a neutral mediator with no settlement reached.
Ralphs allegedly failed to perform individualized assessments of applicants’ criminal histories, provided inadequate notification about the grounds for the conditional job offer being revoked, and unlawfully included questions in its job application form seeking the disclosure of an applicant’s criminal history, a direct violation of the Fair Chance Act’s procedural requirements, the state said.
More than 75% of job applicants who were told their job offer would be withdrawn weren’t provided any way to contact Ralphs to contest the decision, as the law requires. Those offered a way to contact Ralphs were just given a phone number, without being told it was a fax line, who was on the other end, or what format to use to present the information, the CRD said.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory damages for applicants and those who had offers withdrawn, punitive damages, and an injunction.
The agency said it has investigated hundreds of complaints alleging discrimination in employment decisions based on criminal history information and secured some 70 settlements on behalf of affected individuals. The agency earlier this year reached a nearly $100,000 mediated settlement with the Moraga-Orinda Fire Protection District to resolve alleged violations of the Fair Chance Act, one of the largest settlements of its kind on behalf of an individual.
The lawsuit is California Civil Rights Department v. Ralphs Grocery Co., Cal. Super. Ct., No. unavailable, 12/21/23.