FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                          CR
TUESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1996                          (202) 616-2765
                                               TDD (202) 514-1888

                                 
       JUSTICE DEPARTMENT SUES NEW YORK CITY FOR ALLEGEDLY
       DISCRIMINATING AGAINST QUALIFIED MINORITY CUSTODIANS


     WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Justice Department today sued New
York City for using an allegedly discriminatory test in hiring
and promoting minorities who wanted to be custodians and
custodian engineers.  The City could not show that the tests
measured the skills needed to succeed on the job.
     Although nearly half of the qualified labor force is
comprised of minorities, the City school system has hired whites
for 92 percent of its custodian positions.
     The suit, filed today in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn,
accuses the City, its Board of Education and its Department of
Personnel of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
     "We are committed to seeing an American workplace free of
discrimination," said Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights
Deval L. Patrick.  "When unreasonable and unnecessary hurdles
knock out qualified minorities, we will take all steps to
eliminate them and to compensate any victims."
     Patrick claimed that the entry-level and promotional written
examinations used by the City in 1985, 1989 and 1993 unlawfully
discriminated against qualified black and Hispanic test-takers in
part because they cannot be shown to measure how well individuals
would perform on the job.
     To become a custodian, which is a supervisory position, one
must have a high school diploma and two years experience or
education in engineering or in cleaning and maintaining
buildings.  Each school has one custodian who is responsible for
hiring individuals to clean and maintain the schools.
     The custodian engineer position is essentially the same as
the custodian position, except that to qualify for this position
an individual must have a high pressure boiler operating engineer
license and previous experience as a custodian or five years
experience in the supervision of cleaning or maintaining
buildings.
     The median annual salaries for the custodian and custodian
engineer positions are approximately $51,000 and $58,000
respectively.
     The complaint seeks a court order requiring the City to:
    stop using unlawfully discriminatory selection procedures,
     including written examinations;

    engage in recruitment efforts aimed at attracting qualified
     black, Hispanic, Asian and female candidates for the jobs;
     and,

    award appropriate make-whole relief, including job offers,
     back pay, pension benefits and retroactive seniority to
     identified victims of the unlawful written exams.
     Finally, the complaint also called upon the city to bolster
its efforts to recruit Asian and female employees, who are also 
significantly underrepresented in relation to their share of the
qualified work force.
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