{"id":4753,"date":"2013-03-12T09:48:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T13:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=4753"},"modified":"2013-03-12T09:58:54","modified_gmt":"2013-03-12T13:58:54","slug":"eeoc-trampling-freedom-and-common-sense-wash-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/12\/eeoc-trampling-freedom-and-common-sense-wash-times\/","title":{"rendered":"EEOC Trampling Freedom and Common Sense – Wash. Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Tuesday triumph of hope over experience:<\/p>\n

“Maybe congressmen will take time off from making speeches invoking freedom to actually rein in a federal agency trampling Americans\u2019 rights.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

–From today’s Washington Times<\/a> –<\/p>\n

BOVARD: Making the workplace friendly for felons<\/h1>\n

U.S. demands \u2018no questions asked\u2019 of job applicants<\/h2>\n

by James Bovard<\/p>\n

Should it be a federal offense for businesses to refuse to hire felons? Yes, according to new rules issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) intended to browbeat businesses into changing their hiring standards to benefit criminal offenders.<\/p>\n

The EEOC is dedicated to boosting employment of \u201cprotected groups.\u201d The agency\u2019s \u201cEnforcement Guidance on the Consideration of Arrest and Conviction Records in Employment Decisions,\u201d released last April, notes that the imprisonment rate for black men \u201cwas nearly 7 times higher than white men and almost 3 times higher than Hispanic men.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since blacks and Hispanics have higher crime rates, the EEOC has uncorked more than 20,000 tangled words to sway businesses to forgo criminal background checks on job applicants. Even though most businesses perform those checks, the EEOC has made that practice far more legally hazardous \u2014 and far more likely to provoke a federal lawsuit alleging discrimination.<\/p>\n

John Hendrickson, a top EEOC attorney in the Midwest, told the Chicago Tribune: \u201cI would suggest to businesses that they think long and hard about why they think they need to do a criminal background check.\u201d<\/p>\n

The EEOC\u2019s new rules have evoked vigorous opposition from Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow, a Cleveland lawyer with a long record of speaking out against abusive federal affirmative action practices. Mr. Kirsanow recently warned, \u201cThere is no way to guarantee that you won\u2019t run afoul of the guidance and be subject to a financially ruinous EEOC investigation unless you forgo criminal background checks entirely. If you do that, you have two new potential dangers: lose your state license to operate and possibly be hit with a costly negligent-hiring suit.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to EEOC chief legal policy adviser Peggy Mastroianni, however, the commission\u2019s interpretation of federal law \u201csupplants\u201d state and local laws that prohibit businesses from hiring employees with criminal records for certain jobs. This is especially bad news for home repair and home health care businesses.<\/p>\n

The EEOC refuses to look beyond the groups that its intervention purportedly benefits. Pepsi paid $3.1 million last year to settle an EEOC class-action lawsuit spurred by the company\u2019s refusal to hire people with arrest and conviction records. After Pepsi caved, the EEOC issued a press release referring to the \u201cvictims of the former criminal background check policy\u201d at Pepsi. Yet the commission ignores the victims that will be created when companies bow to federal pressure and add violent employees to their payroll.<\/p>\n

Ms. Mastroianni asserts that the EEOC guidance \u201cprovides practical advice to employers on balancing workplace security with civil rights.\u201d Where did the EEOC get the right to mandate reductions in workplace safety?<\/p>\n

This issue is already playing out in courtrooms across the nation. In an ongoing Maryland court case, the lawyer for the Freeman Co., a convention and corporate events planner, requested that the EEOC \u201cquantify the amount of risk of recidivism you contend Defendant [Freeman] is required to tolerate with respect to each crime for each of the jobs listed in Exhibit A, and state your basis for contending that this amount of risk must be tolerated in order to be in compliance with Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act of 1964] when the use of a criminal history background check produces adverse impact\u201d on minority applicants.<\/p>\n

The EEOC refused to answer that question, claiming that it had no obligation to show that rejected job applicants with criminal records did not pose excessive risks to fellow employees or customers. There is no chance that the EEOC will specify exactly how many additional thefts and assaults in the workplace it thinks are necessary to incarnate its vision of \u201cequal opportunity.\u201d As the crowning hypocrisy, the EEOC refuses to disclose whether it uses criminal background checks for hiring people at its agency headquarters.<\/p>\n

The EEOC\u2019s new hiring regime may run into judicial buzz saws from judges exasperated with an agency that makes up the rules as it goes along. Because minorities have more credit problems, the EEOC has been suing companies that conducted credit checks on job applicants. Their highest-profile case \u2014 against Kaplan Higher Learning Corp. \u2014 collapsed in late January. U.S. District Judge Patricia Gaughan tossed the case in part because the EEOC\u2019s data were derived from a panel of utterly unscientific \u201crace raters\u201d who looked at photos from state driver\u2019s licenses and guessed which ones were \u201cAfrican-American.\u201d Judge Gaughan noted how the agency disregarded its own recommendations: \u201cThe EEOC itself discourages employers from visually identifying an individual by race and indicates that visual identification is appropriate \u2018only if an employee refuses to self-identify.\u2019\u201d Unfortunately, the EEOC routinely ignores federal court decisions that seek to curb its power.<\/p>\n

Congress never intended to give equal opportunity to felons and ex-convicts when it enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The EEOC is enforcing a \u201claw\u201d that Congress would never enact unless most congressmen want to get bounced out of office at the next election. Maybe congressmen will take time off from making speeches invoking freedom to actually rein in a federal agency trampling Americans\u2019 rights.<\/p>\n

James Bovard is the author most recently of a new e-book memoir, \u201cPublic Policy Hooligan<\/a><\/strong>\u201d (Sixth Street Books, 2012).<\/p>\n

\"eeoc\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Tuesday triumph of hope over experience: “Maybe congressmen will take time off from making speeches invoking freedom to actually rein in a federal agency trampling Americans\u2019 rights.” –From today’s Washington Times – BOVARD: Making the workplace friendly for felons U.S. demands \u2018no questions asked\u2019 of job applicants by James Bovard Should it be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4756,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[111,109,686,45,673,669],"class_list":{"0":"post-4753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"tag-affirmative-action","8":"tag-eeoc","10":"tag-freedom","12":"tag-obama"},"yoast_head":"\nEEOC Trampling Freedom and Common Sense - Wash. 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