United States District Court Eastern District of Pennsylvania, No. 05-6334
On February 27, 2006, the National NAACP and the Reading Branch NAACP joined an employment lawsuit against the City of Reading, Pennsylvania. The suit charges the Reading Fire Department with implementing discriminatory recruitment and hiring practices against African Americans and other minorities. Although the City of Reading is 11% African-American and 37% Hispanic, the Fire Department is virtually all-white. Of the Fire Department's 147 full-time, uniformed employees, there are no African-Americans and fewer than five Hispanics.
The complaint alleges that the City's discriminatory employment practices include: refusing to recruit and hire African Americans and other minorities for firefighter positions on the same basis as whites; basing such recruitment on a primarily "word of mouth" system that results in the employment of friends and relatives of current City firefighters, the vast majority of whom are white; failing or refusing to adopt nondiscriminatory recruitment, application, testing, and selection techniques for the position of firefighter; and failing or refusing to take appropriate action to correct the effects of its past discriminatory policies and practices.
Plaintiffs in the case are seeking relief in the form of: a permanent injunction barring the City from discriminating against African American and other minority firefighter candidates on the basis of race and/or national origin; a permanent injunction directing the City to adopt and implement a vigorous recruitment program designed to attract qualified African American and other minority applicants for employment in numbers which at least reflect the proportion of minority applicants and candidates in and around the City; lost income and benefits; reasonable attorneys' fees and expert fees.
The case is being litigated by the civil rights organization; the NAACP Legal Department; Rose & Rose, P.C.; Kairys Rudovsky Epstein & Messing; Trujillo Rodriguez & Richards, LLC.
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