The Commission celebrated its 50th Anniversary as a City agency by calling on employers to review their hiring practices and eliminate discrimination. At a December 2005 conference entitled Race At Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market, held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, the panel discussed a Princeton University study describing the uphill battle young minority men with or without criminal records face when securing entry-level jobs in the City and other wide-ranging issues.

The event featured and honored Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, a renowned civil rights and feminist leader and former Commissioner/Chair of the City’s Human Rights Commission from 1970-1977. Other speakers included: Ellis Cose, author, columnist, and contributing editor for Newsweek; Professors Devah Pager and Bruce Western from Princeton University and Glenn Martin, co-director of the Legal Action Center’s National HIRE Network; and Reverend C. Vernon Mason, CEO of Uth Turn. Dr. Edison O. Jackson, President of Medgar Evers College and NYC Human Rights Commissioner co-hosted the program with Commissioner/Chair Patricia L. Gatling.

The panel discussed a study of the impact of race, ethnicity and criminal records on securing entry-level positions. Dr. Devah Pager and Dr. Bruce Western of Princeton University conducted the study with assistance from the Commission and support from the JEHT Foundation. Using matched pairs of testers (Whites and African-Americans or Latinos) applying for the same 1,470 jobs with the same resumes, the professors tracked call-backs, interviews, and job offers. The study revealed that young white high school graduates were twice as likely to be hired as their black counterparts. The Latino testers fared better than blacks by one third in securing the low-wage position. The study also revealed that young black men with no criminal records fared about the same as young white men with criminal records.