Admin Says: "Your Customer Needs To Be Fair"

Among all racial groups, African-American unemployment hovers at 16.2 percent, the highest in the nation.

For Black males, it's 17.5 percent, and for Black teens, it's nearly 41 percent.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) believes that its not by chance that Black unemployment numbers are so high.

The EEOC considers criminal background checks as a possible contributing factor to Black unemployment because 92 percent of employers conduct the screenings on some or all job applicants, according to a 2010 Society for Human Resources Management survey.

In 1996, the number of criminal screenings was only 51 percent.

Due to the large increase of criminal screenings in less than 20 years, the EEOC is investigating how the federal government is dealing with employers who illegally screen out applicants based on prior arrests or convictions without investigating the applicant's age, relevance of the criminal record or seriousness of the crime, as described under the EEOC's guidelines based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The EEOC guidelines regulating employers' use of criminal records dates back over twenty years to 1987.

In it the EEOC makes clear that "an employer's policy or practice of excluding individuals from employment on the basis of their conviction records has an adverse impact on Blacks and Hispanics in light of statistics showing that they are convicted at a rate disproportionately greater than their representation in the population."