PSYCH 639 Week 2 Employment Law for I-O Practice Example

A Lift Test, a Reasoning Test and a Request for Accommodation: Employment Law Behind a Grocery Warehouse's New Hiring Steps

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSYCH/639: Ethics and Professional Skills in I-O Psychology

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The grocery chain, its warehouse jobs, applicants and figures are composites written for a model paper; legal sources and research come from the references listed.

I-O psychologists design the tools organizations use to hire and promote, and employment law sets the boundaries for those tools. This paper reviews a proposed hiring change at my company against federal employment law and research on fair selection.

The Proposal

Desert Fresh Markets operates a distribution center in Tolleson, Arizona, where about 220 order selectors pick cases of groceries onto pallets for delivery to stores. Turnover is high, and injuries from lifting are common. The warehouse director proposed two new hiring steps: a timed lifting test, in which applicants move fifty-pound boxes between a pallet and a shelf for eight minutes, and a twenty-minute written reasoning test purchased from a vendor, which he believes will identify "sharper" workers. In addition, an applicant who had a back injury three years ago asked whether he could be evaluated differently.

Disparate Treatment and Disparate Impact

Title VII, part of the landmark 1964 statute, lists five traits an employer may not hold against anyone: race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Intentional unequal handling, such as rejecting a woman because she is a woman, is called disparate treatment. Disparate impact is the other road: no one intends harm, yet an evenhanded-looking rule screens out one group far more than others.

Impact claims trace back to a North Carolina power station and the 1971 ruling in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a unanimous Supreme Court opinion. At the Dan River plant, the company had begun requiring a high school diploma plus acceptable scores on a pair of generic intelligence tests before anyone could move out of the lowest-paid department, and those hurdles stopped Black workers far more often than white ones. The justices ruled that a rule can look evenhanded and still be illegal if it shuts out a protected group and has nothing to do with doing the job, and that meaning well is no excuse. Congress wrote the sequence into the 1991 Civil Rights Act. A challenger first shows the lopsided result; the employer then has to tie the practice to the job and to real business need; and the challenger can still win by pointing to a fairer option the employer passed over.

The Lift Test

The job analysis our team completed last year found that selectors lift cases weighing between ten and sixty pounds, averaging about nine hundred cases per shift, with many over forty pounds. The lift test mirrors these tasks directly, which supports job relatedness. Because women on average have less upper-body strength than men, the test may produce adverse impact by sex. If it does, the company's defense rests on the job analysis and evidence that the test's pace and weight reflect the actual job, not an inflated standard. I recommended setting the passing standard from the observed work rate of competent current selectors, documenting it and tracking pass rates by sex.

The Reasoning Test

The reasoning test is different. Our job analysis did not identify complex reasoning as a significant job requirement; selectors follow scanner instructions and safety rules. Roth et al. (2001) meta-analyzed ethnic group differences on cognitive ability measures in employment and educational settings and found large average differences between Black and white groups and moderate differences between Hispanic and white groups, though differences varied by job complexity and test type. A cognitive test used for a job that does not require complex reasoning invites adverse impact without a strong job-related justification, the situation Griggs addressed.

Calculating Adverse Impact

In a pilot with 200 applicants, 72 percent of white applicants and 51 percent of Hispanic applicants passed the reasoning test. The ratio, 51 divided by 72, is about 0.71, below the four-fifths guideline of 0.80, which signals possible adverse impact. Given weak job relatedness, the company would struggle to defend the test.

A test can be neutral on paper and still close the door to half the people who could do the job well.

Less Discriminatory Alternatives

Ployhart and Holtz (2008) reviewed strategies for reducing subgroup differences and adverse impact while maintaining validity. Effective strategies included using predictors with smaller group differences, such as structured interviews and some personality measures, combining cognitive measures with noncognitive ones, using work samples and simulations that reduce unnecessary reading demands and improving applicant reactions and test preparation. Less effective strategies included simply removing items with large group differences. Their review supports replacing the reasoning test with a brief work sample in which applicants use a scanner to pick a short order accurately, which measures what the job demands.

The Accommodation Request

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 shields any applicant able to handle the essential duties, with or without changes to how the work is done, and makes the employer fund those changes short of real hardship. Before an offer is made, an employer generally may not ask about medical history at all. A past back injury may or may not be a disability under the law, which defines disability broadly since its 2008 amendments. Employers must assess each applicant individually rather than excluding categories of people.

Lifting is an essential function of the selector job, so the company may require applicants to perform it with or without accommodation. My advice to HR was to talk with him directly, find out whether a back brace or a squat-lift method would let him meet the standard and consider whether the test's setup could change while still checking the one thing that matters, moving the cases. He should not be excluded based on his history alone.

Age and the Physical Test

Federal age law covers anyone forty or older, whether applying or already on the payroll. A physically demanding test may produce lower pass rates for older applicants, and the same logic applies: the company must be able to show that the standard reflects the job. Our job analysis found that several of the warehouse's most productive selectors are in their fifties, which suggests that a standard set from current competent workers will not exclude older applicants who can do the work. Tracking pass rates by age group, alongside sex and ethnicity, will show whether the test behaves as intended once it is in use.

Legal Minimums and Good Practice

The law sets minimums; ethical practice and good science often go further. Even if a test survived legal challenge, using a tool with weak job relevance wastes applicants' time, harms applicant reactions and may screen out good workers. I-O psychologists should advise on legal risk but recommend practices that are valid and fair regardless of legal pressure, and they should involve employment counsel for legal conclusions.

Recommendations

I recommended adopting the lift test with a standard set from current workers and tracking pass rates, dropping the reasoning test in favor of a scanner work sample and creating a written accommodation process for all hiring steps. Employment counsel reviewed and agreed.

Conclusion

Employment law asks whether hiring practices are related to the job and whether less discriminatory alternatives exist. A careful job analysis supports the lift test, but the reasoning test fails the standard Griggs set half a century ago. Research on reducing adverse impact and the ADA's individualized approach point toward a selection process that is legally sounder and simply better.

References

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, 42 U.S.C. § 12101 et seq. (1990).

Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971).

Ployhart, R. E., & Holtz, B. C. (2008). The diversity-validity dilemma: Strategies for reducing racioethnic and sex subgroup differences and adverse impact in selection. Personnel Psychology, 61(1), 153-172. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2008.00109.x

Roth, P. L., Bevier, C. A., Bobko, P., Switzer, F. S., III, & Tyler, P. (2001). Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: A meta-analysis. Personnel Psychology, 54(2), 297-330. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2001.tb00094.x