Unnecessary Litigation

The truth is that many of the employment discrimination suits coming to court today could have been avoided. Particularly the lawsuits that follow a reduction in force ("RIF"). Too often - when plaintiffs' statistical expert submits his or her report -- management is surprised to see results supporting the discrimination charge. Surprised because they thought the selection procedures they used were objective. Surprised because someone in Human Resources had "eye-balled" the numbers and told management they were OK. Surprised because they thought they had built in every reasonable safeguard and surprised because they're seeing these statistical results for the very first time. That should never happen.

Pre-Testing the RIF List

Management should and can know before the RIF list is implemented whether or not it will, if analyzed statistically, support a discrimination charge. How? Integral's experts will run the same set of statistical tests on the proposed RIF list as will be applied to it if, in fact, a charge is brought. Then, if the results of pre-testing show areas of vulnerability, managers have the time to review their decisions in those areas; to confirm (and fully document) that business necessity, rather than bias, determined the selections and, in ambiguous cases, to re-consider the termination decision.

The Statistical Criteria

The process is perfectly straightforward because the Supreme Court has enunciated the statistical criteria necessary for an inference of employment discrimination. In two landmark cases - Castaneda v. Partida (March 1977) and Hazelwood School District et al. v. United States, shortly thereafter (in June 1977), the Court stated that -- to prevail -- plaintiff must demonstrate that the disparity in termination rates complained of is at least "two standard deviations" in size. Integral's experts -- working with the legal department and with Human Resources – will run the required "two standard deviation" tests on the RIF list before you finalize it.

How the Process Works

First, we meet with you to review your plans and goals for the RIF. For example, we need to know whether the RIF will be company-wide or limited to particular job groups, departments, divisions or facilities. We need to know the factors governing your decisions about which parts and functions of the company should contract and which should remain the same size or even expand. We need to know the employee characteristics on which you are focusing in making your decisions about which employees in the contracting areas of the company's operations will be retained and which will be terminated.

Next we arrange with your Human Resources and computer operations people to obtain a copy of your company's electronic personnel database. Once we have your database on our system, we prepare the computer programs we'll need for the pre-testing of your proposes RIF list, so that we can run our tests on it as soon as you've completed it. Our goal at this stage of the process is to get the results to you in the shortest possible time.

Being Prepared

Whatever the statistical results are, you will be prepared. If discrimination claims are made, you are ready to deal with them. And we are ready to assist you at every step.