Monitoring and Responding to Discrimination
Thursday, April 6, 2006
By: NIAC Staff - News

On April 24th, 2003, Monster.com, with no specific directive from the U.S. of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), removed references to Iran and six other countries from its standard format for job-seekers' resumes effectively preventing individuals in these countries, regardless of their nationality, from using Monster.com's service.

Washington, DC - On April 24th, 2003, Monster.com, with no specific directive from the U.S. of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), removed references to Iran and six other countries from its standard format for job-seekers' resumes  effectively preventing individuals in these countries, regardless of their nationality, from using Monster.com's service.

What Monster.com called a “technical glitch” in its system also removed these countries from the drop down box under the education section of online resumes, preventing individuals educated in these countries from listing the locations of the institutions where they received their degree. As a result, a U.S. citizen with a PhD secured from a university in Iran would have seemed like a high-school dropout if he or she used Monster.com’s service under the new policy.

A few days before Monster.com’s new policy went into effect, numerous NIAC members requested that direct action be taken to reverse Monster.com’s decision. NIAC organized a nationwide campaign aimed at ending this corporate discrimination, and within two days— with over 1,500 complaint letters sent to Monster.com via our website — the company offered written guarantees of a partial reversal. Individuals could again relist their educational experiences in the education section of their resumes. This was a monumental victory for the Iranian-American community, and NIAC’s leadership was widely quoted in the media, including a front-page story in the Washington Post on July 9, 2003.

However, in the post-9/11 era, discrimination will continue unless organizations like NIAC monitor institutional behavior, bring such policies into public light, and challenge them. NIAC is particularly worried that such forms of institutionalized discrimination will become common practice and thereby, informally redefine the law — unless NIAC and other organizations are there to stop them.

As a result, NIAC is developing a Civil Rights Watch Program to monitor and, when needed, challenge government and private sector policies to ensure that discrimination against Iranian Americans is eradicated. The program will require two full-time staffers, as well as part-time legal and public relations consultants.