The U.S. Census Bureau has reached a $15 million settlement of a lawsuit claiming it discriminated against black and Hispanic job applicants with criminal histories during the 2010 census by making it too hard to document their readiness for work. It requires the Census Bureau to hire two “industrial organizational” psychologists to design criminal history screening criteria for the 2020 census that limit the impact on blacks and Hispanic job applicants. About $5 million of the payout would go toward helping notify class members of upcoming hirings, or fix mistakes in their criminal history records. Much of the remainder could go toward legal and administrative costs, court papers showed. Though a judge in July 2014 certified a class action covering roughly 450,000 blacks and Hispanics, individual class members would not receive payments.
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