Michigan Seamless Tube to pay $500,000 for hiring discrimination

Michigan Seamless Tube, a South Lyon company that spun off from a failed division of Vision Metals, will pay $500,000 to settle a class-action race-discrimination lawsuit filed by the EEOC for refusing to hire black former employees of Vision Metals.

When Michigan Seamless began operations in November 2002, the company hired 52 former Vision employees. None of them was black. The company continued to bring back former employees through 2005 without rehiring a single black worker, despite the fact that many had more experience than the rehired white workers. Some of the white workers, in fact, were trained by the black employees who were turned down for the same jobs.

Under the consent decree, Michigan Seamless will recruit black applicants and provide anti-discrimination training to all its employees, managers and executives.

“The case shows that race discrimination is still a major problem in today’s workplace, more than 40 years after passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act,” an EEOC attorney said.