Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Companies Sued For Trying To Avoid Hiring Convicts

June 12, 2013

In 1963, the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King said it was his hope that black Americans would no longer be judged on their color of their skin, but on the content of their character.

Fifty years later, the Obama administration's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says King got it wrong.

The EEOC launched two lawsuits against private companies this week over their use of criminal background checks, claiming that in rejecting applicants with proven criminal records, they somehow discriminated against minorities under a disparate impact clause in their guidelines.

Aside from the inherent and insulting racism in that presumption — suggesting that black applicants have crime in their DNA because statistics show more have criminal records — the measure puts employers, in this case Dollar General Stores and BMW Manufacturing, in an impossible position.

On one hand, they may be sued if they don't hire criminals to satisfy the EEOC.

On the other hand, if they do hire criminals, they could be sued later by customers and shareholders when employees of whatever race do their jobs under the influence of drugs, get violent with co-workers or customers, embezzle money, or steal from the company.

Those things will hurt profits, but only if EEOC gets its way.

Equally troubling, this underscores the White House's increasingly aggressive interference in hiring and firing decisions by private employers — a power businesses need to keep a first-rate workforce in an increasingly competitive world.

During this serious economic slump, businesses have focused on hiring the most productive, highest-character employees possible — whatever their race.

These lawsuits aren't the work of a regulatory agency that follows the rule of law. It's the work of an activist panel that follows the rule of lawsuit.

The EEOC's only power is to issue "guidelines" and then subjectively determine if those guidelines have been followed to its liking. That includes an employer's "business necessity" to not hire people with certain records for certain jobs.

Both Dollar General and BMW, it should be noted, said they did follow EEOC guidelines as they were written as recently as 2012.

But in the case of Dollar General, the EEOC claims the company did 344,000 background checks on applicants and employees, 25% of whom were black. Of the 26,700 rejected for criminal records, 31% were black — a 6-percentage-point difference.

In the case of BMW Manufacturing in South Carolina, 645 employees were screened for criminal records. Some 55% of those were African-American, but they made up 80% of the rejections for criminal records.

Yes, there's a disparity.

But is that racism, or does it reflect the very real different social circumstances for two groups? If the latter, why should companies bear the cost for correcting social inequalities?

More troubling is why these companies were targeted at all.

According to the campaign finance website followthemoney.org, Dollar General and its employees gave 75.52% of their campaign donations to Republicans from 2003 to 2012, just 24.25% to Democrats.

BMW Manufacturing in the same period gave 56.4% of its campaign donations to Republicans and 43.6% of its donations to Democrats.

If the government's spurious raid on Gibson Guitar is any guide, political targeting — not equal opportunity — may be behind these lawsuits. If so, it will have a damping effect on hiring across the private sector.

If a company can be singled out for not hiring convicts and if the EEOC can decide who companies must hire, businesses may cover themselves by hiring a few convicts just so they aren't sued by a politically motivated EEOC.

To excel, businesses must hire the best people they can. It's an axiom taught on the first day of business school.

But the EEOC, using the racist card, is forcing employers to hire some of the worst possible people — regardless of race.

It's yet another thing holding back U.S. businesses — and jobs.

Source: IBD

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