4. Given the fact that each of its stores has only a handful of employees, is her company covered by equal rights legislation? One of the first problems Jennifer faced at her father s Carter Cleaning Centers concerned the inadequacies of the firms current HR management practices and procedures.

One problem that particularly concerned her was the lack of attention to equal employment matters. Each store manager independently handled virtually all hiring; the managers had received no training regarding such fundamental matters as the types of questions they should not ask of job applicants. It was therefore not unusual in fact, it was routine for female applicants to be asked questions such as Who s going to take care of your children while you are at work? and for minority applicants to be asked questions about arrest records and credit histories. Nonminority applicants three store managers were white males and three were white females were not asked these questions, as Jennifer discerned from her interviews with the managers. Based on discussions with her father, Jennifer deduced two reasons for the laid-back attitude toward equal employment: (1) her father s lack of sophistication regarding the legal requirements and (2) the fact that, as Jack Carter put it, Virtually all our workers are women or minority members anyway, so no one can really come in here and accuse us of being discriminatory, can they?