The number of claims against Utah employers for unpaid wages hit a record high over the past fiscal year, and complaints of discrimination against job candidates, particularly Muslims, are on the rise, officials said this week during a forum on immigration issues.
"I have no doubt the events of Sept. 11 have had a direct impact on employment issues in this country," said Harold "Hap" Stephens, bureau manager for the state Labor Commission's Antidiscrimination & Labor Division. "We've had a record number of wage claims (against employers), and we've had a record low in the percent of the monies we've been able to collect from them."
That tells Stephens that more businesses in Utah over the past year have suffered severe financial problems due to a poor economy. "They're in more financial trouble than has ever happened," he said.
During fiscal year 2002, which ended June 30, 1,848 wage claims were filed with Stephens' office compared with 1,200 in fiscal 2001 and 800 in 2000. The number of cases of alleged discrimination stayed about the same as the prior fiscal year, around 600, Stephens said.
But in Utah and across the nation, a higher percentage of those cases have involved complainants from people of Middle Eastern descent.
"It's amazing to me we don't have double the number of discrimination cases that we get, because I have no doubt there's much more discrimination going on," Stephens said, adding that such cases are hard to prove.
The daylong forum held Thursday at the Horizonte Center was sponsored by state and federal labor agencies.
While hiring workers of different nationalities can be difficult because of language barriers, a caseworker at the Utah Refugee Employment Center said she believes employers of late have been refusing to hire refugees — particularly those from the Middle East — for another reason: growing prejudices against the Muslim community post Sept. 11.
And the closer it gets to the first anniversary of the terrorist plane crashes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon that claimed more than 3,000 lives, the harder it is to place such candidates, even when they clearly are qualified for the positions they are seeking, said caseworker Khaltum Abdikadir, a native of Somalia who accompanies her clients to their initial job interviews.
"I'll be calling up employers, and they'll have an opening that fits exactly one or more of our clients' job skills and as soon as we walk in the door, they'll say, 'Oh, we already filled that position.' And in one case, I had called just 10 minutes before," said Abdikadir, who as a Muslim wears some of the traditional robed attire of her culture. "It's been happening more and more often."
She blames the fallout from Sept. 11 and points to employers' reactions as proof. They get startled when female potential hires walk in dressed in traditional Muslim attire with long robes, head dress and scarves, and some also have grown gruff when men with dark skin walk in.
Her boss, Lina Smith, said she witnesses the same thing. "I've had Middle Eastern men and men who have darker skin who are from Afghanistan or wherever who come in and have been here a while, speak good English, but still — over and over again — have not been able to get hired."
Still, this prejudicial trend against potential candidates is not completely widespread. The refugee employment center works with about 30 Utah employers who purposefully hire natives from other nations simply because they know such populations struggle to find work, she said. The most successful placements involve jobs that don't require interactions with English-speaking customers, like the company that hires workers to clean airplanes at Salt Lake International after they land, or deliver concessions to restaurants at the airport. Data entry is also a successful area for placement, as is busing tables or performing kitchen duties at eateries.
The employment center placed 536 people in Utah in the last year, 186 of which were refugees. "We've only been open two years but that's a good number," Smith added.
But even when such workers do get hired, discriminatory practices continue to exist and are growing more prevalent nationally, said Ralph Chamness, regional director for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. One woman from the Middle East recently filed a complaint with the commission because her co-workers kept jibing her after Sept. 11. "They kept calling her Mrs. Osama and asking her how to make a bomb," Chamness said.
According to the EEOC, 655 discimination complaints have been filed nationally since Sept. 11, compared with 289 during the same period a year ago.
Two pilots have filed complaints in the past year after losing their job. One was a native from Lebanon who had worked for a major American airline as a charter pilot. A co-worker reported him to management after overhearing him say he didn't agree with the United States' Middle Eastern policies. He was suspended from his job after 8 years of employment on Sept. 15, 2001, and told it was because of his radical views and that he posed safety concerns for airline customers, Chamness said. The other pilot was fired after being told that passengers didn't feel comfortable flying with him, he said.
"There's been a four-fold increase in the number of religious charges since Sept. 11 of last year . . . a lot of blatant discrimination."
E-MAIL: nharrison@desnews.com