AP Photo/Eric Gay
- Dollar General rescinded job offers to applicants with high blood pressure or poor eyesight, an EEOC lawsuit claims.
- Applicants to its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama had to complete "extensive" medical exams, per the EEOC.
- The discount retailer has agreed to pay $1 million to settle the disability-discrimination lawsuit.
Dollar General violated disability-discrimination laws by rescinding job offers to some applicants with high blood pressure or poor eyesight, a federal agency said in a lawsuit.
The discount retailer has now agreed to pay $1 million to settle the lawsuit, first filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2017.
Dollar General required people who held offers for roles as general warehouse workers at its Bessemer, Alabama distribution center to pass a pre-employment medical examination, the lawsuit said.
The EEOC said the medical examinations were "extensive, and often, highly invasive," and included taking vital signs, a drug test, a vision test, a review of current medications, "and a physical examination, including, in some instances, genital examination of job applicants."
The retailer rescinded job offers for some qualified individuals with disabilities, even when these wouldn't affect their ability to safely carry out the job, the EEOC's suit claimed. These included offer-holders whose blood pressure exceeded 160/100 or who didn't have at least 20/50 vision in both eyes, according to the lawsuit.
The examinations also included health questionnaires during which offer-holders had to divulge their family members' past and present medical conditions, including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, the lawsuit claimed.
Dollar General dismissed candidates based on the results of their medical examinations, and the selection criteria "were not job related or consistent with business necessity," the EEOC claimed.
The EEOC filed its lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, alleging that Dollar General's hiring process violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act (GINA). The company stopped requiring pre-employment medical exams for these warehouse jobs after the lawsuit was filed, the EEOC said in a press release.
Dollar General said in a response to the lawsuit in 2018 that its employment decisions were made for "legitimate, non-discriminatory business reasons and not for any unlawful or improper purpose."
"Any alleged discriminatory or otherwise unlawful behavior imputed to Dollar General was neither intentional, knowing, reckless, nor malicious," the retailer said.
Dollar General acknowledged that offer-holders did have to complete a physical assessment, carried out by a third-party health provider, before they could be formally hired. However, it denied unlawfully seeking genetic information by asking offer-holders to complete a family medical-history questionnaire, and said that if this questionnaire was required by the provider then it was done without the knowledge of Dollar General.
The parties' settlement agreement was approved by Judge Madeline Hughes Haikala on October 18. As well as paying $1 million to affected applicants for warehouse worker roles at the Bessemer site, Dollar General agreed to review and revise its ADA and GINA policies, train all hiring staff on this annually, and require its medical examiners not to request family medical history, the settlement states.
"Requiring individuals during the hiring process to answer invasive questions about medical conditions of their grandparents, parents or children violates GINA," Bradley Anderson, the EEOC's district director in Birmingham, Alabama, said in a statement. "An employer is prohibited from soliciting this information, regardless of whether the information is used to deny employment."
Insider contacted Dollar General for comment, but did not immediately receive a response, outside regular US business hours.