Old 08-13-2018, 07:16 AM
  #16  
Excargodog
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Originally Posted by rickair7777 View Post
Again, I'm not advocating for the tests, and I have no detailed knowledge of their statistical utility, if any. Could be just some more BS the HR ladies made up to justify their existence.

My gut feel is that the best (only) avenue to challenge the practice would be to show that it's unfair, as opposed to an ADA violation. But unfair isn't necessarily illegal, so you'd probably have to tie it to some other law, ie discrimination for something such as gender, race, age, etc.

These things have been around for a while, you'd think some industrious shyster would have already at least considered a class action by now if there was any merit to it.

Also... you might have trouble getting pilots to join you. If they've reached their career-destination job, they probably don't care anymore. If they haven't, most probably don't want to volunteer to be on a very public list of people who fail personality tests and also sue airlines. That list would end up taped to the wall in every airline recruiter and HR manager's office. Litigious people are not a protected class, you can discriminate in hiring against them as far as I know.
IN order to have standing to sue you would need to have been rejected as an applicant by an airline using such a test, but that doesn't mean that you wouldn't necessarily be successfully hired by another one. Nor would having "failed" such a test actually mean anything about you as a pilot or employee. Even those HR people who advocate for these tests acknowledge a huge false rejection rate
And see them mainly as a vehicle for cheaply culling down a massive number of advocates.

The biggest problem, IMHO, is that this is a seriously big cottage industry that is going to fight tooth and nail to stay in business, and the merit argument requires a knowledge of statistics that most people don't have, making the ADA route, or discrimination against protected classes, or similar legal argument a far easier route for the judges, jury, and regulators to understand.

But eventually some shyster may indeed pick this up. It hasn't affected me yet, but I know some guys who seem to me like great pilots and employees that claim to have been shafted by the Hogan.

Just doesn't seem right to have them brushed aside because of a test that misclassifies people so often.
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