The Discrimination Against White Men Accelerates Yet More

From the Center for Equal Opportunity:

In case you missed it, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently handed down new  Enforcement Guidance that greatly limits the extent to which employers can consider arrest and conviction records of job applicants, principally on the grounds that doing so can have a “disparate impact” on the basis of race and ethnicity...

In a press release earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that Pepsi “has agreed to pay $3.13 million and provide job offers and training”after an EEOC “investigation revealed that more than 300 African Americans were adversely affected when Pepsi applied a criminal background check policy that disproportionately excluded black applicants from permanent employment.”

This appears to be a straight “disparate impact” claim. That is, there is no claim that Pepsi’s policy on its face treated applicants differently on account of race, or was designed to exclude blacks, or was not evenhandedly applied — just that blacks were, statistically, more likely to be excluded by the policy and that Pepsi, in the opinion of the EEOC, did not have a good enough reason for thinking that people without criminal records would be better employees than people with criminal records...

Businesses are, understandably, not happy about all this: “Many in the business community have complained that the Guidance was rushed through with no public rulemaking or the associated process for public comment—a refrain recently echoed by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee responsible for EEOC funding and Commissioner Constance Barker in her dissent.” I have been a frequent critic of the disparate-impact approach, but really—telling employers when they can and can’t consider criminal records?

My thought: Is a society really better when the government pressures employers to hire more felons and fewer non-felons? Is that fair to law-abiding job applicants?  Especially with so few jobs available? Is this not another frightening example of the Obama Administration's foundational belief in redistributive "justice," in egalitarianism over meritocracy?  My view is that this is Alice-in-Wonderland: So much of what's right is now deemed wrong. 

The administration has repeatedly promised to ramp up its use of disparate-impact claims not only in employment but in other areas of civil-rights enforcement — like mortgage lending, school discipline."

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The Wall Street Journal, which ought to know better, has put together a “Women in the Economy” Executive Task Force, and recently held a “Women in the Economy” conference that was reported on in the Journal. As in the past, these folks seem not to have heard of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which makes it illegal for employers to engage in discrimination because of sex. Ignoring that little problem, the task force’s working groups included these recommendations:

• “Hold senior managers accountable by tying promotion and compensation to meeting diversity goals and requiring regular reports to the board.” “[T]his group advised setting diversity targets and holding the senior executives’ feet to the fire . . .” “[E]xecutives whose ‘pay or promotions are at risk’ are more likely to change.”
• “Post jobs regularly and ensure a diverse candidate slate. Hold regular succession-planning reviews and make managers accountable.”
• “Require a diverse slate of candidates, and include women directors on the nominating committee.” “Make gender diversity nonnegotiable.”
• “Find at least one female candidate for every technical job. Reward the C-suite for retaining and promoting women.”
• “Government should be a role model for hiring, committing to 30% women at the top and reporting on progress.”

It cannot be argued with a straight face that these recommendations are anything but a call for companies (and the government) to set and enforce quotas on the basis of sex.

All this is particularly ironic in light of the unemployment rate being higher for men and that, per my previous post, the reasons for any gender pay gap are mainly the choices that women make.