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August 16, 2010
The Obama Administration: Enhancing criminals' job prospects
I read this the other day and flagged it for later incredulity: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has expanded it's mission, presumably under the guidance of the Obama Administration, to include telling employers they may not consider whether or not someone interviewing for a job is a criminal.
Lest you think I'm making this up, I went to the EEOC website, where I grabbed this screenshot:
How do you like them apples?
Ed Morrisey argues over at Hot Air:
Actually, no, it’s not also true for a conviction. With a conviction, an employer can assume that the person committed the crime and make hiring decisions based on that information, in whole or in part. The point about arrests is a good one, but most background checks done by hiring companies only include convictions (and in some cases, civil actions as well); arrest records that don’t lead to court appearances are not usually that easy to acquire.
The hiring process involves a series of value judgments, with only a few objective measures. For employers who conduct background checks, conviction records supply one of the few objective measures in the process. If an employer has a choice between two equally qualified applicants and one has a conviction for fraud or theft, it would be absurd to tell the employer that the hiring decision cannot rest on that data. And yet, that’s exactly what the EEOC argues in this “advice” on compliance with its regulations — which in this case the EEOC acknowledges doesn’t exist on this topic. The EEOC is making a recommendation based on its own opinion rather than actual law.
[…]
But here’s the real question: if truly unfair discrimination has become so rare that the EEOC has to attack reasonable and rational choices in hiring based on the actual record of the applicant, hasn’t the EEOC argued for its own dismantling?
I think -- based on the evidence before us -- that it's well past time to send the EEOC packing.
BONUS: Did you note the passage in the EEOC's post that refusing to hire someone because of criminal conduct "could limit the employment opportunities of some protected groups"?
Is the EEOC saying that certain "protected groups" are more likely to have criminal records than other prospective employees who, perhaps, don't belong to any "protected groups"?
Sounds pretty racist to me -- and I should know, for I've recently attended my two-hour, taxpayer-funded refresher on preventing workplace discrimination.
Shame on the EEOC. Bad commission! Bad!
Posted by Mike Lief at August 16, 2010 07:52 AM
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