Job-Breakers

...Transport Inc., a Wisconsin trucking firm, for not hiring enough blacks and Hispanics and for not keeping paperwork in order from the mid-1970s...

...In a similar case in late 1991, the EEOC compelled a $2 million settlement out of World's Finest Chocolate, a Chicago candy maker...

...The EEOC then insisted that Consolidated must pay $5,000 each, plus interest, to "non-Koreans who applied for cleaner positions . . . but were rejected, as well as to those non-Koreans who did not apply for cleaner employment . . . but who would have applied for such employment had they been aware that such employment was available," according to a confidential EEOC settlement proposal...

...A 1988 GAO report noted investigative deficiencies in up to 87 percent of cases in one EEOC office...

...Felons' Best Friend...

...Regardless, the honesty of a prospective employee is certainly a vital consideration in the hiring decision...

...The EEOC has already issued numerous bizarre rulings expanding the definition of "disabled" (holding, for instance, that obese people cannot be discriminated against because of their fat...

...The EEOC was unable . . . to find a single person out of the 99 rejected non-Koreans who could show that he or she was interested in a job that Mr...

...instead, they are concerned only with doling out the windfalls to people of the proper race...

...The EEOC sued on behalf of a Hispanic man denied a permanent job who had twice been arrested and who had served eighteen months in prison for larceny...

...In 1989, the EEOC sued Carolina Freight Carrier of Hollywood, Florida, for refusing to hire as truck drivers people who had been convicted of felonies (especially larceny) and who had served prison time...

...Did you know you may have been discriminated against and that you may have money coming to you?' What really burnt me and hurt me is that the government said that other people came forward [and alleged discrimination...

...A 1986 New York Times editorial noted that "national surveys estimate that blacks commit robbery at a rate 10 times that of whites...

...The EEOC argued that the only legitimate qualification for the job was the ability to operate a tractor trailer...

...Even people who did not apply for a job can be eligible for a payoff if an EEOC official decides that the person would have applied except for a company's reputation for discriminatory hiring...

...Daily Labor Report summarized the dispute in April 1993: WWW claims that because of the intimate physical contact with members, and exposure to nudity and partial nudity in showers, locker rooms, and exercise rooms, the employment of men would violate legitimate privacy interests of the club members...

...In a major case in Chicago, EEOC sued the Women's Workout World (WWW) chain of health clubs for sex discrimination...

...Routinely, the EEOC punishes or threatens to punish employers if minority job applicants give the wrong answers to test questions...

...The EEOC has brought several lawsuits against,women's health clubs for their refusal to hire male employees...

...It is ironic that the government penalizes a private company for relying on a person's criminal record, since both the federal and state governments suspend many of a person's civil and constitutional rights once he is convicted of a felony...

...If we can keep that faith, and bring justice to those seeking the opportunities in this country, then all Americans will benefit...

...EEOC attorney Elaine Chaney explained that the law was discriminatory because "blacks and Hispanics are far more likely than whites to have arrest records...

...The EEOC found that of the 60,000 complaints it received in 1987, there was cause to believe discrimination had occurred in fewer than 3 percent...

...Hwang ever hired for...

...EEOC's Allison Nichol explained, "Their method of recruitment was primarily by word-of-mouth through their existing work force, which at the time, was primarily white, thereby excluding blacks from knowing about the jobs...

...In June 1992, the EEOC sued Continental Air Transport, claiming that its policy of not hiring people with arrest records violated federal civil rights law...

...It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer . . . to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin...

...Rather than creating equal opportunity, this process simply led to a general political confiscation and redistribution of opportunity...

...There are hundreds of thousands of jobs in New Jersey for women who do not want to flaunt their anatomy—but instead of simply telling the potential plaintiffs to change their line of work, the EEOC instead tries to force Sands hotel to change its corporate style...

...Lafferty replied, "Yes we do...

...Women usually choose to join an exclusively female health club in order to get away from male oglers and sexual innuendos while doing squats and bench presses...

...That apparently a higher percentage of Hispanics are convicted of crimes than that of the "white" population may prove a number of things such as: (1) Hispanics are not very good at stealing, (2) whites are better thieves than Hispanics, (3) none of the above, (4) all of the above...

...Posner concluded: It would be a bitter irony if the federal agency dedicated to enforcing the anti-discrimination laws succeeded in using those laws to kick [immigrants] off the ladder by compelling them to institute costly systems of hiring...

...Race norming is the perfect example of the EEOC's concept of "fairness"-4ying about people's ability so that it can secretly pick the winners and losers among job applicants...

...Persons approach Hwang or his employees—most of whom are Korean too—at work or at social events, and once or twice Hwang has asked employees whether they know anyone who wants a job...

...It routinely presumes that businessmen who seek to hire workers with more than minimal qualifications are acting unfairly toward less qualified workers...

...The act explicitly banned racial quotas, declaring: James Bovard is the author of Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, to be published in April by St...

...According to Attorney General Janet Reno: Ultimately a failure to vigorously protect civil rights is an intolerable breach of faith with the people who have entrusted tremendous power to their government...

...It argued that the female-only requirement for these jobs is a bona fide occupational qualification...

...As Robert Holland of the Richmond Times-Dispatch noted, "The EEOC's chief psychologist has promoted a definition of 'test fairness' that condemns any test, no matter how job-related or unbiased, as 'unfair' when racial groups differ in their score averages...

...In 1991 EEOC chairman Evan Kemp warned of a "crime 32 The American Spectator March 1994 wave of discrimination...

...The EEOC routinely forces employers to pay off complainants, even when the EEOC lacks clear evidence that the employer was guilty of discrimination...

...The EEOC almost always intervenes against competence—in support of the notion that workers do not need to be as intelligent, as literate, or as capable as an employer demands...

...It spent seven years suing Consolidated Services Company, a Chicago janitorial service owned by Koreans...

...Bruce Spitzer, the lawyer for Consolidated Services, a Korean-owned Chicago janitorial firm, observed that the EEOC demanded that the firm pay $475,000 in "back pay," primarily to people who never worked for the company, as a penalty for its alleged discrimination...

...Mike Welbel, the owner and manager of Daniel Lamp Co., observed two years later, "The government wentthrough our records of job applicants, and called up people and asked, 'Are you white, Hispanic, or black...

...At press time, top Clinton officials were reportedly searching for some other qualified Hispanic to head the agency...

...The premise of modern civil rights law is that federal coercion produces a fairer result than the voluntary agreements of private citizens...

...Federal civil rights policy presumes that politicians should be the ultimate judges of which opportunities each group of citizens should receive—that politicians and bureaucrats should have practically unlimited power to tilt the economic playing field in the direction of preferred players...

...Race-norming consists of covertly manipulating test scores, effectively lowering the scores of whites and Asian-Americans and raising the scores of blacks and Hispanics, in order to reduce differences in test scores...

...EEOC chairman Clifford Alexander announced in 1968: "We...

...In fact, it is doubtful that any one personality trait is more important to an employer than the honesty of the prospective employee...

...The ADA prohibits discrimination against the disabled, and the EEOC has jurisdiction over most ADA complaints...

...resident Clinton is still p struggling to name a chairman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, perhaps the federal government's most revered symbol of coercive good intentions...

...Obviously a rule refusing honest employment to convicted applicants is going to have a disparate impact upon thieves...

...And because of the ADA, the EEOC now has the largest backlog of discrimination complaints in its history—over 80,000...

...Morley Safer of CBS's "60 Minutes" noted: "Daniel Lamp Company is in an old building on the southwest side, broken into so many times that [the owner] has had to bar every window in the place...

...The agency has a long history of scorning evidence in its investigations...

...He cut a deal to allow personal acquaintances, his brother, three former Yale Divinity School students, and others to file false claims of having been denied employment by C.W...

...instead, it assumed that the fact that its employees were almost all Korean proved the company's guilt, according to Spitzer...

...Other EEOC lawsuits seem devoted to minimizing Americans' freedom of association...

...Erma Fields, an EEOC paralegal, was also conThe American Spectator March 1994 35 victed, after four members of her family received settlement checks...

...It is strange to characterize requiring the wearing of high heels as a civil rights violation...

...Hwang did buy newspaper advertisements on three occasions—once in a Korean-language newspaper and twice in the Chicago Tribune—but these ads resulted in zero hires...

...Carolina Freight truckers carried .such freight as computers, munitions, and drugs...

...With race norming, each citizen has an equal opportunity to have his job test scores secretly raised or lowered in response to government manipulation or intimidation...

...The EEOC also based its lawsuit on the complaint of one black woman who applied but was not hired...

...Yet at, the same time the EEOC is prosecuting WWW, it is helping to create expansive doctrines of sexual harassment to prosecute other companies for not preventing male employees from asking female employees out on dates...

...The 1964 act also specifically required that an employer have shown an intent to discriminate in order to be found guilty...

...You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet Whatever absurdities the EEOC has concocted in recent years are almost certain to be exceeded in the Clinton era...

...Since drivers were largely unsupervised, the company believed the drivers were the primary sources of theft losses...

...The only accomplishment is when we look at all those numbers and seb a vast improvement in the picture...

...The EEOC announced in 1987: It is the Commission's position that an employer's policy or practice of excluding individuals from employment on the basis of their conviction records has an adverse impact on Blacks and Hispanics in light of statistics showing that they are convicted at a rate disproportionately greater than their representation in the population...

...At the federal trial of Consolidated Services, the EEOC provided only four witnesses: a secretary who Posner believed did not honestly want a janitorial job, a second whose testimony was judged "incredible" and who openly contradicted himself, a third whose testimony was also dismissed as unbelievable, and a fourth who had been fired from his last job for stealing and who insisted that he saw The simple threat of a discrimination lawsuit frequently compels businesses to pay off complainants, regardless of the merits of their case...

...in October 1993 that the Carolina Freight decision in no way caused the EEOC to rethink its national litigation policy...

...On July 21, 1992, the EEOC announced that it was filing a sex discrimination lawsuit against Sands Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for maintaining a dress code that is enforced unequally against cocktail servers based on gender...

...The EEOC measures its good deeds in part by the size of the cash settlements it finagles for blacks, Hispanics, and other "protected classes...

...The EEOC's internal newsletter, Equal Times, frequently lists victories achieved by regional offices that result in payments of $2,500 or $5,000 to employees or ex-employees who threatened to sue their employers for discrimination...

...millions of women, after all, voluntarily wear such shoes...

...Though the Reagan administration in principle opposed such policies—and the Bush administration paid lip service to such opposition—neither administration made any fundamental changes in the federal regulations defining discrimination in the private sector...

...The EEOC never even attempted to build up evidence that the company had actively discriminated against specific individuals...

...When the EEOC filed its lawsuit, it announced: This is an action . . . to correct unlawful employment practices on the basis of race (Black) and to make whole Lucille Johnson, and all other Black applicants and Black potential applicants for employment aggrieved by the unlawful employment practices...

...In addition, the dress policy of Sands Hotel places a disparate standard on the female cocktail servers based on their sex in violation of Title VII, by requiring them to wear a sexually provocative and revealing costume, and high heels, while males wear tuxedo-type uniforms and comfortable dress shoes...

...The EEOC asserted that since Hispanics have a higher rate of felony convictions than do whites, the company's policy violated the law because of its disparate impact on Hispanics...

...Shrouded in a cloak of good intentions, the EEOC represents the epitome of the paternalist state's contempt for rendering justice to individuals...

...But obviously, we are out to suspect the employer...

...EEOC acting General Counsel James Neely announced in August 1993 that the EEOC is resolving "more charges for more money than ever...

...Consolidated would have been required to identify such non-applicant claimants by "placing advertisements in the media," among other steps, to find out those who might have applied for a job if they had known...

...Martin's Press...

...The EEOC claimed the firing was based on discrimination against a member of a "protected class"—i.e., that the company used Perez's attack on a co-worker solely as a pretext to treat him unfairly...

...The question is whether the circumstantial evidence compels an inference of discrimination—intentional discrimination...

...Race "norming" was a result of the EEOC' s attack on private tests...

...It would be in the agency's character and should surprise no one if Clinton's EEOC decides to resolve the backlog the same way the Carter administration did the last time the EEOC fell similarly behind: by effectively ruling, without any hearing at all, that most of the accused employers are guilty as charged...

...From the 1970s onward, the EEOC, through its regulations and lawsuits, created an overwhelming legal presumption that employers who do not hire ample numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities will be found guilty of discrimination...

...It is not so much that people "have entrusted tremendous power to their government"—but that government policy-makers have seized far more power over private employers than most Americans realize...

...of Chicago was unable to provide basic police protection to the company, the federal government had sufficient resources to punish the company for hiring too many of the wrong minorities...

...Other people did not know about the case—the government solicited other people...

...Finding the rightful recipients of the windfall was especially tricky, since the company's files of old job applications had been destroyed in a flood...

...The EEOC exists largely to compel employers to treat job applicants and employees unequally, and thus generates an unending series of harebrained lawsuits...

...Welbel noted that he and his black and Hispanic employees "got along just fine—until Big Brother came in...

...but "60 Minutes" found that during the time that the EEOC said Daniel Lamp was discriminating, the company had actually hired eleven black employees...

...Welbel eventually settled the EEOC's lawsuit by agreeing to pay $8,000 a year for three years into a settlement fund...

...After the $1 million bounty was rendered to the EEOC, EEOC lawyer John Milton was placed in charge of finding 200 blacks and Hispanics who were illegally denied jobs by the company up to fifteen years before...

...Hwang relies on word of mouth to obtain employees rather than reaching out to a broader community less heavily Korean...

...The government declares that a convicted felon cannot be trusted to pull a lever in a voting booth, yet seeks to penalize private companies who feel the person cannot be trusted with $100,000 in private property...

...The simple threat of a discrimination lawsuit frequently compels businesses to pay off complainants, regardless of the merits of their case...

...According to Richard Epstein's Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, the EEOC "demanded that Daniel Lamp not only pay her back wages of some $340, but also that 'it spend $10,000 in advertisements to detect other blacks who might have answered want ads, and to pay them another $123,000 in back pay...

...simply a pretext for discriminating against minorities, hence illegal...

...Safer interviewed Jim Lafferty, the EEOC's director of legislative affairs, and asked him if an employer "has three black employees and doesn't hire a fourth for whatever reason, and that fourth accuses him of discrimination, do you prosecute...

...But, by the late 1960s, the EEOC had intentionally subverted the law by establish'ng a definition of discrimination far wider than Congress authorized...

...Norming Scores The EEOC strives to enforce a "know-nothing egalitarianism" on hiring policies...

...36 The American Spectator March 1994 EEOC has continually sought to expand the types of treatment of women which are punished by law...

...Though the city...

...It is the cheapest method of recruitment...

...The judge—Jose Gonzalez, Jr.—was outraged at the EEOC's "condescending attitude towards Hispanics": EEOC's position that minorities should be held to lower standards is an insult to millions of honest Hispanics...

...The fact that an employer would settle a charge for a few thousand dollars instead of spending almost a hundred thousand dollars in court to prove his innocence only shows that corporate managers are not idiots...

...The EEOC had bad luck in the federal judge who was selected for the case...

...Milton and his brother were convicted of conspiracy, theft, and making false statements to the EEOC...

...If Hispanics do not wish to be discriminated against because they have been convicted of theft then they should stop stealing...

...Kathleen Courtney of the EEOC's Office of General Counsel stated...

...The EEOC often attempts to bludgeon small companies with large settlement demands...

...The more expensive lawsuits have become, the more arbitrary the power the EEOC has over employers...

...The EEOC EEOC has obtained negotiated settlements for some charges on which GAO believes there was no reasonable cause to believe that the charges were true...

...Mass Guilt by the Numbers The 1964 Civil Rights Act created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...

...And I could not do it any more...

...Consolidated rejected the settlement and was later, vindicated in federal court...

...While such achievements may look good on a press release, the EEOC fails to mention that the average cost of defending against a discrimination lawsuit for an employer is approximately $80,000...

...CI The American Spectator March 1994 37...

...Welbel was shocked at the government's overreaching, but, his lawyer explained to him, "They are the government—they can do anything...

...Rescuing Scantily Clad Women The EEOC also polices and punishes practices that it claims discriminate against women...

...The three district offices we reviewed strongly emphasized obtaining negotiated settlements on all charges —regardless of the evidence of employer guilt...

...The American Spectator March 1994 33 Hwang's ad in the Chicago Sun-Times, where Hwang never advertised...

...What type of crime wave was the EEOC battling at that time...

...But the EEOC considers health clubs that serve only females and hire only females to be unfairly discriminating against men...

...In the 1970s the EEOC began suing companies that refused to hire people with criminal records...

...The judge fumed that "to say that an applicant's honest character is irrelevant to an employer's hiring decision is ludicrous...

...When the EEOC gets a pot of money to distribute, there are few reasonable guidelines about who should receive a windfall...

...After the discrimination claimants cashed their $6,000 payoff, Milton permitted them to keep $1,000 to $1,700, and kept the rest for himself...

...To hold otherwise is to stigmatize minorities by saying, in effect, your group is not as honest as other groups...

...And the EEOC will likely become far more powerful in the coming years...

...The EEOC has long pressured companies either not to use written tests for job applicants or to change the test scores to provide extra benefits to minority job applicants...

...In one EEOC district office, some supervisors commented that they frequently placed more emphasis on meeting their quantitative goals than adhering to the Compliance Manual requirements for investigators...

...We never had a racial incident—we never had anything—the church and civic and community leaders backed us up...

...The EEOC had sued the Daniel Lamp Company in 1991 for allegedly discriminating against blacks...

...Such a standard gives almost any frustrated minority job applicant a legal bomb to throw at potential employers...

...In 1992, the EEOC sued the Flasher Company of western Oklahoma for firing Edward Perez...

...Shakedown City: EEOC Settlement Policy In 1986 the EEOC sued C.W...

...at EEOC believe in numbers...

...EEOC policy practically seeks to change criminal records from liabilities into assets—into pretexts for lawsuits alleging discrimination...

...The EEOC' s open contempt for fairness was reined in during the Reagan and Bush eras, but the system still has a strong bias in favor of complainants...

...A federal appeals court rejected the EEOC's claim...

...Our most valid standard is in numbers...

...Federal judge Ann Claire Williams conceded that the health club has "articulated a legitimate privacy interest with regard to nudity...

...34 The American Spectator March 1994 discharged after he punched another employee, causing the truck the second employee was driving to go into a ditch...

...Milton proved that government employees also have entrepreneurial talents...

...George Bush's Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 is already a Pandora's Box for litigation and a delight for the trial lawyers...

...The company was in a Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago and relied on Hispanic organizations to refer job-seekers...

...This case might have merit if Sands Casino had the power to conscript women at random and force them into wearing skimpy outfits...

...Ever since the early 1970s, the The EEOC almost always intervenes against competence—in support of the notion that workers do not need to be as intelligent, as literate, or as capable as an employer demands...

...As one former high-ranking EEOC official says, "The official line is that we do not take sides...

...The EEOC has sued companies for firing employees who have violently attacked other employees on the job...

...According to lawyer Jeffrey Norris of the Equal Employment Advisory Council, a private organization in Washington, some EEOC offices make little or no effort to find people who were actually discriminated against...

...When the controversy over race-norming became public in 1991, EEOC officials admitted that they had threatened to sue other private corporations if they refused to race-norm test results...

...Perez, a Hispanic employee, was Even people who did not apply for a job can be eligible for a payoff if an EEOC official decides that the person would have applied except for a company's reputation for discriminatory hiring...

...Lafferty also commented on the 8.45 number: "All too often when confronted with such numbers, employers have assumed that they represent quotas...

...My family and I could not function...

...a 1981 General Accounting Office report concluded: Investigative staff in four of the six district offices we reviewed said they were still required to meet headquarters-established production goals, or face some adverse action such as low performance rating...

...The EEOC initially demanded $8.6 million, but settled for $1 million in 1987...

...The company's average loss from a theft exceeded $100,000 and the company attributed 85 percent of the thefts to employee misconduct...

...Daily Labor Report noted, "The court said it also will assume at this point that members of the club have a privacy interest in preventing the opposite sex from touching their breasts and buttocks...

...Federal judge Richard Posner noted in his March 1993 decision: There is no direct evidence of discrimination...

...Consequently, many employers have come to believe the law requires quotas and have surreptitiously hired by numbers to avoid challenges...

...The result is racial hiring quotas via threat of federal and private lawsuits...

...The EEOC ran a computer test, compared Daniel Lamp to much larger employers within a three-mile radius, and informed the company that it was guilty of breaking federal law because it did not have 8.45 black employees...

...Consolidated has been dragged through seven years of federal litigation at outrageous expense for a firm of its size...

...We just want to find out the truth about how bad the employer is...

...A federal judge initially awarded the EEOC summary judgment but then reversed her decision after WWW provided petitions signed by over 10,000 members who vowed not to patronize the clubs if males were hired...

...It's unlikely the nomination will raise many eyebrows, for few federal agencies have received as much power and as little scrutiny as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission...

...In the prosecution of Atlas Paper Box Co., a Tennessee corporation, EEOC officials argued that the fact that the company did not race-norm job applicants' test scores was evidence of bias against black applicants...

...Welbel agreed to the settlement partly because he just wanted to be "left alone...

...Transport...

...All of the company's twenty-six employees were either black or Hispanic...

...Mr...

...Yet, as GAO noted, "In an additional 12.5 percent of closed charges, EEOC obtained settlement from the employer in which some relief was provided for the charging party without determining whether there was cause to believe discrimination had occurred...

...In January, the administration was on the verge of nominating Ida Castro, a female Hispanic labor lawyer, but backed off because civil rights groups complained of Castro's lack of experience in job discrimination lawsuits...

...Many, perhaps most, of these were persons who responded to the ad he placed in the Chicago Tribune for a contract that he never got, hence never hired for...

...The EEOC often argues that "discrimination" against ex-convicts is...

...Welbel observed, "My whole life was fighting this thing...

...GAO further noted: reached that sum simply by calculating that, since 95 percent of laborers in Chicago are non-Asians, Consolidated was guilty of discriminating whenever its payroll had more than 5 percent Koreans...

...The U.S...

...Convicted felons are prohibited, for example, from owning guns or voting in most states...

...Posner observed, "This was a sorry parade of witnesses, especially when we recall that the [EEOC] culled it from a list of 99...

...EEOC officials publicly asserted that Daniel Lamp had refused to hire any blacks...

...he EEOC will sue a T company over almost any procedure that results in an "inappropriate" number of minority employees...

...Department of Labor effectively imposed race norming on state employment services, changing millions of job applicants' test scores by federal fiat...