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June 24, 2002
Home Depot, Female Employees Report Progress
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Home Depot's commitment to equal-opportunity employment came under new scrutiny two weeks ago, amid news reports that it was no longer honoring the specially-issued credit cards of federal employees. The company told managers in a memo that it didn't want to be regarded as a federal contractor, though spokesmen subsequently maintained that avoiding federal scrutiny of its employment practices wasn't a factor in the matter.
The Dow Jones news service reports that in regard to the court dispute, it appears Home Depot has made progress in the promotion of female employees. In 1997, Home Depot agreed to pay $87.5 million and establish a new hiring process to settle a class-action suit alleging discrimination against women. The company never admitted any wrongdoing.
In the suit, female employees had alleged that women were placed in cashier jobs rather than sales positions. This was critical because the applicants for department supervisor, assistant store manager and store manager were largely drawn from the sales floor.
In the motion filed this week in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, attorneys representing the employees and Home Depot said the company exceeded quotas for hiring women in the most recent six-month reporting period under the consent decree.
James Finberg, a plaintiffs' lawyer, said the benchmarks compare the number of women hired for certain positions to the percentage of women who were qualified for the job. The decree generally requires that the percentage of women hired must meet or exceed the percentage of women in the final applicant pool, Mr. Finberg said.
For example, in the Western stores, from September 2001 to March 2002, 32 percent of the people in the "adjusted qualified pool" for sales positions were women and 39.3 percent of those hired were women, according to the court filing. Furthermore, 20 percent of the qualified applicants for assistant store manager were women and 26.7 percent of the people hired were female.
Almost a quarter of the store managers hired in the Western stores during this six-month period were women, the plaintiffs and Home Depot said, but females only represented 11.8 percent of the applicants in the "adjusted qualified pool."
When employees filed the initial discrimination case in 1994, Mr. Finberg said only about 10 percent of Home Depot's employees on the sales floor were female. Today, he said it is about 23 percent nationwide.
A separate consent decree, similar to this one and filed in U.S. District Court in New Orleans, covers Home Depot stores in the eastern U.S. Christine Carty, a plaintiffs attorney in New York, said her firm doesn't plan to terminate its decree early.
A hearing for the motion to terminate the decree in California is set for this week.
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