The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced it settled a national origin discrimination suit with a temporary staffing firm, a local franchise and one of its clients. Separately, the EEOC also announced it filed a suit in May against a staffing firm for refusing to hire an applicant because of a disability.

In the first case, Express Services Inc. and its local Greenville, S.C., franchisee, AJK Enterprises LLC, along with Proformance Group, a Greenville-based industrial firm, agreed to pay $42,500 and provide other relief in the settlement, according to the EEOC. The companies had been accused of improperly dismissing Rosmery Diaz-Caraballo, a Guatemalan-born, naturalized U.S. citizen, because she was unable to produce a U.S. birth certificate, according to the EEOC.

For more details on the settlement and the case, click here.

In a separate announcement, the EEOC reported last month it filed a lawsuit against Randstad US LP for failure to hire an applicant who disclosed he had Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. According to the suit, the staffing firm originally fast-tracked Jason O’Dell’s participation in the hiring process for a lab technician job. While completing Randstad’s hiring paperwork, however, O’Dell disclosed the disability. Soon after, he was told that the lab technician position had been put “on hold;” O’Dell was not hired and Randstad continued to recruit and hire for the lab technician position, according to the EEOC

For more on this story, click here.