The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Wednesday revived a Title VII action against Ford Motor Company alleging a discriminatory hiring scheme excluding Hispanic and Latino individuals.

The plaintiffs allege that this discrimination has resulted in a lack of Hispanic and Latino line workers at Ford’s Chicago assembly plant that does not reflect the racial makeup of the surrounding area. The district court dismissed this suit for failure to exhaust administrative remedies.

The plaintiffs are seven Hispanic or Latino individuals who applied to work as line workers at the Chicago plant. Only one of them took the pre-employment basis skills test. They allege that Allan Millender, a black Ford employee and the Chairman of the United Auto Workers Union for the Chicago plant, aimed to hire predominately black employees because he believed they would support him as the union leader.

In a filing with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the plaintiffs alleged that they were disparately impacted by the pre-employment skills test or that their applications were stalled in some other way. Several non-Hispanic and non-Latino applicants have been hired without taking the basic skills test.

A plaintiff filing suit after an EEOC complaint “may only bring claims that were included in her EEOC charge, or that are ‘like or reasonably related to the allegations of the charge and growing out of such allegations.'” This is to give some warning to the employer to “attempt reconciliation without resort to the courts.”

The district court dismissed the complaint due to the apparent contradiction between the EEOC complaint and the present allegations, stating both that these applicants are both disparately impacted by the tests but also not allowed to begin testing.

The Seventh Circuit found that the plaintiffs’ disparate impact claim should survive, as it is sufficiently related to the EEOC complaint, and sent it back to the district court. That claim alleges that the workforce at the plant is inconsistent with the racial makeup of the surrounding area.

Additionally, the Seventh Circuit found that the plaintiffs’ single-sentence request for leave to amend their original complaint was properly dismissed in the lower court; a leave to amend needs to provide some grounds for amendment or explain how that amendment would cure the complaint.