EEOC

Many New Job-Killing Regulations from the Obama Administration

by Hans Bader on August 30, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, International, Legal, Regulation

Andrew Stiles describes “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations” from the Obama administration that will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus discourage anyone from setting up new trucking companies.

Still another is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring — a practice it is now considering broadening, through agency guidance further restricting consideration of applicants’ criminal histories in hiring decisions. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? If you don’t hire a criminal, the EEOC may sue you for “disparate impact”; but if you do hire the criminal, you may later be sued under a state law for “negligent hiring” if the criminal harms someone on the job or while doing errands for your company.

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Regulation of the Day 175: Firing Dwarves

by Ryan Young on May 20, 2011

in Legal, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Starbucks is in some hot water for firing an El Paso employee on her third day back in 2009. The employee happens to be a dwarf. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is suing the coffee chain for violating federal law. Starbucks counters by saying that the employee posed a safety hazard to her colleagues.

She asked to be given a stool to help her perform her duties. That could pose a tripping hazard for others. In a business built around piping-hot liquid, tripping hazards can be dangerous indeed.

Maybe Starbucks broke the law; maybe it didn’t. The courts will decide in due time. But there’s good reason to think that this law is a bad one.

That’s because EEOC is ignoring an important unintended consequence. It’s trying to help.  But it is actually hurting the very people it wants to protect.

Starbucks is learning — the hard way — that every dwarf and every disabled person it hires is a lawsuit waiting to happen. It is easy to imagine this having a chilling effect on its hiring practices. Why hire any disabled people at all? It would be nice to help out and give a job to someone who needs it. Bt  for many employers, it’s just not worth the litigation risk.

With the economy as it is, it’s hard enough as it is to find a job, especially for people with disabilities. The EEOC is only making it harder on them. Good intentions are nice. But results are what matter. And the result of EEOC’s lawsuits is less employment equality, not more.

Unemployment Jumps to 9.8 Percent; Stimulus and New Regulations Wipe Out Jobs

by Hans Bader on December 3, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Stimulus to Nowhere

Unemployment has jumped to 9.8 percent. The population has grown recently, but the number of jobs has remained virtually flat. The White House seems to have learned nothing from this, and there is talk of yet more wasteful stimulus spending.

The stimulus package’s costly “green jobs” subsidies sent American jobs overseas. Their biggest recipient was a bankrupt Australian company that imported Japanese turbines for a windmill farm.  79 percent of the subsidies went to foreign firms.  Spain’s “green jobs” program, which Obama cited 8 times as a model for his own green jobs and global warming programs,  completely failed, destroying jobs and driving up Spain’s skyrocketing government deficit. Each new green job “created” in Spain wiped out 2.2 existing jobs and cost $800,000.   New EPA rules dealing with global warming are expected to wipe out more than 800,000 jobs, while proposed EPA ozone rules could wipe out millions more.

48 out of 50 states have lost jobs since passage of the $800 billion stimulus package.  The Obama administration falsely claimed that passing the stimulus package would keep unemployment under 8 percent, but now it’s close to 10 percent.  The stimulus also contained other provisions that wiped out jobs in America’s export sector, and it encouraged states to impose new job-killing burdens on business through changes to their statutory unemployment-compensation schemes.

Obama’s EEOC appointees are unprecedently hostile to employers, making the Carter-era EEOC look friendly to business by comparison.  New laws backed by Obama, and Obama administration regulations governing employers, have discouraged employers from hiring new employees.

The EEOC: “The Fox Guarding the Henhouse”

by Hans Bader on March 31, 2009 · 4 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Sanctimony

“The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation’s workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees, an arbitrator has ruled.”

The EEOC has a much worse record of labor and civil-rights violations than most corporations and agencies with a similar-size workforce.

The EEOC was found guilty of systematic, illegal, reverse discrimination (discrimination against white males) in Jurgens v. Thomas, 29 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. (BNA) 1561, 1982 WL 409 (N.D.Tex.1982). When he was head of the EEOC, Clarence Thomas tried but apparently failed to end the reverse discrimination that went on in the agency.

The EEOC also has had a lot of sexual harassment lawsuits against it (and I am talking about real sexual harassment, not weak claims based on a couple of off-color jokes, the sort of trivial thing the EEOC itself might unsuccessfully sue a private employer over).See, e.g., Spain v. Gallegos, 26 F.3d 439 (3rd Cir.1994).

In short, the EEOC is like “the fox guarding the henhouse.” See John Berlau, “Discrimination at the Opportunity Commission,” Insight, May 19, 1997.

The EEOC continued to discriminate against white male employees, including those white males, like attorney Joseph Ray Terry, that it sent to defend affirmative action in court. See, e.g., Terry v. Gallegos, 926 F.Supp. 679 (W.D. Tenn. 1996) (court ruled that agency discriminated against attorney Joseph Ray Terry, who has long argued in court on behalf of affirmative action).

Ironically, Terry, after winning his reverse discrimination suit, argued that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 preempted California’s state constitutional amendment banning reverse discrimination. I and the other attorneys who represented the amendment’s sponsors successfully argued that it did not. Although a trial judge agreed with him, the federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit overturned that decision, and upheld the amendment, known as Prop. 209. That court also rejected claims by the ACLU that Prop. 209, by mandating equal treatment for whites, Asians, and males, and thus prohibiting many forms of affirmative action, itself violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. See Coalition for Economic Equity v. Wilson, 122 F.3d 692 (9th Cir. 1997). (The ACLU also argues that free speech, privacy, jury trial, and other constitutional rights need to be restricted to protect minorities).

The world would be a better place if the EEOC spent more time rooting out discrimination in its own ranks, and less time trying to ban offensive words protected by the First Amendment, and less time suing the Salvation Army for requiring employees to speak English (a lawsuit far more harmful than the EEOC’s silly lawsuit against Hooters).

The EEOC seems hypocritical, but perhaps no more so than a President who harps endlessly on “responsibility” while proposing a budget that would increase projected deficits by $4.8 trillion to $9.3 trillion, flouting his repeated campaign promise to implement a “net spending cut” if elected (plus a pork-filled $800 billion stimulus package that will shrink the economy).