Swordsmyth
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Last Wednesday in Baltimore, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a suit against the convenience store chain Sheetz, arguing that their use of criminal background checks in hiring violates federal civil rights law.
To be clear, the government hasn’t found any evidence that Sheetz deployed the background checks in a racially conscious way — the EEOC is challenging the use of criminal background checks per se.
The government intends to force Sheetz to hire applicants who were previously denied employment, providing them with “back pay” and retroactive seniority.
In a similar case in 2012, Pepsi was ordered to pay $3.13M and invited in the future to “take into consideration the nature and gravity of the offense, the time that has passed since the conviction and/or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job sought in order to be sure that the exclusion is important for the particular position.”
In other words, the government won’t tell you what the rules are: you have to guess.
They dangle multimillion-dollar payouts in front of “marginalized” employees, and demand that employers anticipate what the EEOC’s subjective judgment of their actions might be.
Discrimination complaints of this kind are heard by your local EEOC investigator, who takes statements and makes a “preliminary” determination as to whether illegal discrimination has occurred.
But the EEOC gets the outcome they want from the district judge 96% of the time — and attorneys on both sides know this — so only 0.1% of cases go to court. If the EEOC bureaucrat says to pay up, you pay up.
The investigator has no obligation prove anything; they just have to find “sufficient reasonable cause” to believe that discrimination occurred.
And discrimination can be defined as broadly as “unwelcome verbal conduct” (i.e. saying things the complainant doesn’t like), so long as the investigator believes that the conduct is motivated by a discriminatory attitude toward protected characteristics.
In other words, you don’t have to shout slurs — if you criticize an employee’s performance, and the investigator thinks your criticism is unfair and that you are some flavor of bigot, that’s enough to justify a shakedown.
This means that virtually any interpersonal conflict in the workplace might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of litigation — and employees in protected categories have massive incentives to generate or fabricate such conflicts.
This risk is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, which is one reason that labor-intensive businesses are dominated by massive conglomerates. You have to pay to play.
Conservative commentators love to characterize HR and DEI as “dead weight” patronage jobs, as if they were the product of bureaucratic bloat or laziness — but DEI mandarins aren’t lying when they say they perform a business-critical function.
If you are identified as a thought-criminal with respect to any legally-protected category, and your employer fails to discipline or terminate you, then any gender creature at the office can decide that you make them Feel Unsafe, and start building a case to put their hand in the company’s pocket.
Corporations don’t hire sprawling HR and DEI departments out of inertia, or because they’re afraid of popular pressure: they do it because they need an internal constituency that is as crazy as their craziest employee — that can keep the organization up to date with the latest progressive moral panic, and punish dissenting employees long before they generate a lawsuit. A DEI department is as practically necessary to the modern American corporation as Legal or Accounting.
Your local Chief Inclusion Officer is an agent of US state security, empowered to conduct intelligence and enforcement operations against ideological enemies beyond the jurisdiction of the regular authorities.
It’s a brilliant workaround — it would, of course, be unconstitutional for the regular police to monitor your private communications and punish you for ideological crimes — but the EEOC built a $30B network of internal informants and political officers (twice the size and 3X the budget of the KGB at its peak) who are not accountable to the Constitution, and got your boss to pay for it.
More at:
blog.exitgroup.us
To be clear, the government hasn’t found any evidence that Sheetz deployed the background checks in a racially conscious way — the EEOC is challenging the use of criminal background checks per se.
EEOC’s enforcement guidelines say the same — though their section on “less discriminatory alternatives” doesn’t actually suggest any alternatives.
The government intends to force Sheetz to hire applicants who were previously denied employment, providing them with “back pay” and retroactive seniority.
In a similar case in 2012, Pepsi was ordered to pay $3.13M and invited in the future to “take into consideration the nature and gravity of the offense, the time that has passed since the conviction and/or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job sought in order to be sure that the exclusion is important for the particular position.”
In other words, the government won’t tell you what the rules are: you have to guess.
They dangle multimillion-dollar payouts in front of “marginalized” employees, and demand that employers anticipate what the EEOC’s subjective judgment of their actions might be.
Discrimination complaints of this kind are heard by your local EEOC investigator, who takes statements and makes a “preliminary” determination as to whether illegal discrimination has occurred.
But the EEOC gets the outcome they want from the district judge 96% of the time — and attorneys on both sides know this — so only 0.1% of cases go to court. If the EEOC bureaucrat says to pay up, you pay up.
The investigator has no obligation prove anything; they just have to find “sufficient reasonable cause” to believe that discrimination occurred.
And discrimination can be defined as broadly as “unwelcome verbal conduct” (i.e. saying things the complainant doesn’t like), so long as the investigator believes that the conduct is motivated by a discriminatory attitude toward protected characteristics.
In other words, you don’t have to shout slurs — if you criticize an employee’s performance, and the investigator thinks your criticism is unfair and that you are some flavor of bigot, that’s enough to justify a shakedown.
This means that virtually any interpersonal conflict in the workplace might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of litigation — and employees in protected categories have massive incentives to generate or fabricate such conflicts.
This risk is existential for small and medium-sized businesses, which is one reason that labor-intensive businesses are dominated by massive conglomerates. You have to pay to play.
Conservative commentators love to characterize HR and DEI as “dead weight” patronage jobs, as if they were the product of bureaucratic bloat or laziness — but DEI mandarins aren’t lying when they say they perform a business-critical function.
If you are identified as a thought-criminal with respect to any legally-protected category, and your employer fails to discipline or terminate you, then any gender creature at the office can decide that you make them Feel Unsafe, and start building a case to put their hand in the company’s pocket.
Corporations don’t hire sprawling HR and DEI departments out of inertia, or because they’re afraid of popular pressure: they do it because they need an internal constituency that is as crazy as their craziest employee — that can keep the organization up to date with the latest progressive moral panic, and punish dissenting employees long before they generate a lawsuit. A DEI department is as practically necessary to the modern American corporation as Legal or Accounting.
Your local Chief Inclusion Officer is an agent of US state security, empowered to conduct intelligence and enforcement operations against ideological enemies beyond the jurisdiction of the regular authorities.
It’s a brilliant workaround — it would, of course, be unconstitutional for the regular police to monitor your private communications and punish you for ideological crimes — but the EEOC built a $30B network of internal informants and political officers (twice the size and 3X the budget of the KGB at its peak) who are not accountable to the Constitution, and got your boss to pay for it.
More at:
Code:
https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/how-the-eeoc-built-americas-secretHow the EEOC built America's secret police, and got companies to pay for it
Last Wednesday in Baltimore, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a suit against the convenience store chain Sheetz, arguing that their use of criminal background checks in hiring violates federal civil rights law. To be clear, the government hasn’t found any evidence that Sheetz...
blog.exitgroup.us
