Company Prefers Not To Hire Applicants Who Use Public Transportation To Get To Work

Eco­nom­ic hard­ship and job insta­bil­i­ty are grow­ing rapid­ly, affect­ing work­ers across the U.S. as they strug­gle to sup­port them­selves and their fam­i­lies. The unpre­dictable job mar­ket only makes it all worse.

For one man who shared a job expe­ri­ence on Red­dit, find­ing work has been espe­cial­ly hard, not because of his qual­i­fi­ca­tions or expe­ri­ence, but because he does­n’t have a car. Sur­pris­ing­ly, since the pan­dem­ic, pub­lic trans­porta­tion has tak­en a sig­nif­i­cant hit in the U.S., with only around 3% of the pop­u­la­tion uti­liz­ing trains, busses, and sub­way sys­tems to get to work.

Accord­ing to his post, the man­ag­er pre­ferred that any­one hired for the role be some­one who did not rely on pub­lic trans­porta­tion as a means of com­mut­ing.

A company told a job applicant they’d prefer not to hire anyone who commutes using public transportation.

“As some­one who used to walk 5 miles and take two trains dai­ly, still always arriv­ing ear­ly, this real­ly stuck with me,” he wrote in his post. “Appar­ent­ly, it was a ‘pref­er­ence’ of the man­ag­er.”

In a tele­phone inter­view with the com­pa­ny, the man­ag­er was­n’t shy about ask­ing “exact­ly” how he would be arriv­ing to work, ask­ing about a dri­ver’s license, car, and trans­porta­tion with­out it being a con­di­tion of .

As many com­menters not­ed, this kind of ques­tion­ing a hir­ing man­ag­er, espe­cial­ly when the job does­n’t require a license or car, could be a type of dis­crim­i­na­tion, although state laws like­ly vary.

RELATED: Bus Pas­sen­ger Demands Woman Move Her Bag From Seat So She Can Sit Next To Her — Despite Plen­ty Of Emp­ty Seats Around Her

Commenters agreed that the employee shouldn’t have to disclose his preferred method of commuting or whether he owns a car if it is not integral to the role he is applying for.

The Equal Employ­ment Oppor­tu­ni­ty Com­mis­sion (“EEOC”) con­sid­ers car own­er­ship “finan­cial infor­ma­tion,” so being asked about it dur­ing an inter­view and sub­se­quent­ly turned away could be con­sid­ered unfair dis­crim­i­na­tion.

Of course, he would need to con­tact an employ­ment lawyer to see any real change or com­pen­sa­tion from this com­pa­ny, which often isn’t afford­able or acces­si­ble for appli­cants with­out job sta­bil­i­ty or income.

Man smiling on his phone on public transportation. Pix­elsEf­fect | Can­vaPro

“These com­pa­nies are out of their minds,” one com­menter added. 

“I used to work for the Tran­sit Agency in a major . I was told we need­ed reli­able trans­porta­tion to get to work and the pub­lic tran­sit (that we were work­ing on) was­n’t con­sid­ered reli­able.”

If they want to con­trol your com­mute and how you arrive to work, they should be the ones to pay for it — whether that’s a car stipend, a com­pa­ny-owned car, or some oth­er means of trans­porta­tion. 

They can set expec­ta­tions for arriv­ing at work on time, but they can’t rea­son­ably expect not to use pub­lic tran­sit.

Many workers are forced to bear the burden of failing public transit if they even have access to it.

If a work­er has the “lux­u­ry” of in a city where pub­lic trans­porta­tion is even avail­able, let alone acces­si­ble, often the infra­struc­ture is fail­ing or inef­fi­cient. 

Sad­ly, pub­lic trans­porta­tion is the only option for many, espe­cial­ly those with­out the means to own a car or the abil­i­ty to pro­cure a license.

In an exper­i­ment con­duct­ed by “ Block” on Tik­Tok, cre­ators revealed the true bar­ri­ers that employ­ees walk­ing to work or using pub­lic trans­porta­tion real­ly have to deal with. From not hav­ing a safe and acces­si­ble side­walk to make it to the bus stop to walk­ing miles to hop on a train, and even worse, rely­ing on oth­er co-work­ers or friends to dri­ve them — it’s an unsta­ble, unsafe, and wide­ly unre­li­able sys­tem.

But that does­n’t make it okay for com­pa­nies to decide that pub­lic trans­porta­tion is “too unre­li­able” for use, espe­cial­ly if they have the means to sup­port work­ers with a com­pa­ny car, a stipend for -shares, or more reli­able tran­sit.

Ulti­mate­ly, refus­ing to even con­sid­er hir­ing an indi­vid­ual based on their com­mut­ing pref­er­ences would be dif­fi­cult to prove, but that’s what makes it even more nefar­i­ous and dis­crim­i­na­to­ry.

RELATED: Work­er With A Mas­ter’s Degree Only Mak­ing $18 An Hour Says A 30-Minute Com­mute Is Not Worth Mak­ing More Mon­ey

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