The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported Monday that Illinois staffing firms Personnel Staffing Group LLC — which does business as Most Valuable Personnel — and MVP Workforce LLC will pay $568,500 to settle a discrimination lawsuit.
It said the companies discriminated against Black and female applicants by refusing to send them on work assignments or by sending them for fewer hours of work. The EEOC said the companies did so both on their own initiative and at the request of clients who did not want Black workers or sought only men for certain assignments.
“Temporary agencies, like other employers, are prohibited under federal law from discriminating based on race or sex in work assignments, even if it is their clients who are making the discriminatory requests,” said Julianne Bowman, EEOC’s district director in Chicago. “When a temp agency complies with such requests, it violates the law.”
The MVP and MVP Workforce locations involved in the suit were in Cicero, Joliet and Franklin Park, Illinois.
MVP Workforce also agreed to a two-and-a-half-year consent decree that requires it to adopt a process to identify qualified applicants for temporary worker assignments, provide periodic reports to the EEOC about applicants and train employees, among other things. MVP is not currently doing business in Illinois but it must implement similar measures if it resumes operating in the state.