Feds Force Private Businesses to Give Hiring Priority to Criminals

For anyone who doesn’t get it yet that the federal government is the enemy of any productive, decent, law-abiding American, this story ought to help:

Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory “guidance” to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders.

The ruling kakistocracy is made up of reprobates who live by a criminal creed of coercion and theft. That they look out for their fellow malefactors is hardly surprising.

Typically, they frame the issue in terms of their racial caste system, which places despised Caucasians at the bottom.

In the late 1970s, the EEOC began stretching Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to sue businesses for practically any hiring practice that adversely affected minorities. In 1989, the agency sued Carolina Freight Carrier Corp. of Hollywood, Fla., for refusing to hire as a truck driver a Hispanic man who had multiple arrests and had served 18 months in prison for larceny. The EEOC argued that the only legitimate qualification for the job was the ability to operate a tractor trailer.

Businesses are not allowed to count being likely to refrain from stealing whatever is inside the trailer as a job qualification.

The EEOC has proclaimed that “criminal record exclusions have a disparate impact based on race and national origin.” That means if two people want a job, one a criminal and the other responsible and law-abiding, you had better hire the criminal if you don’t want to be crushed by a lawsuit.

Though blacks make up only 13% of the U.S. population, more blacks were arrested nationwide for robbery, murder and manslaughter in 2009 than whites, according to the FBI. The imprisonment rate for black men “was nearly 7 times higher than White men and almost 3 times higher than Hispanic men,” notes the EEOC.

The solution to this tendency toward sociopathic behavior on the part of liberals’ Chosen People is obvious: punish those who do not break the law.

Former EEOC General Counsel Donald Livingston, in testimony in December to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, warned that employers could be considered guilty of “race discrimination if they choose law abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions” unless they conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ex-offender’s recent life history.

Please, I just want to hire somebody who won’t steal my truck…

The EEOC is actually demanding that Freeman Companies “pay compensation to rejected job applicants who lied about their criminal records.”

In a statist utopia, everything is either mandatory or forbidden — except when it is both:

The biggest bombshell in the new guidelines is that businesses complying with state or local laws that require employee background checks can still be targeted for EEOC lawsuits. …

As Todd McCracken of the National Small Business Association recently warned: “State and federal courts will allow potentially devastating tort lawsuits against businesses that hire felons who commit crimes at the workplace or in customers’ homes. Yet the EEOC is threatening to launch lawsuits if they do not hire those same felons.”

Characteristically of liberals, EEOC bureauweenies drip with hypocrisy — or is this just obamunist transparency?

At the same time that the EEOC is practically rewriting the law to add “criminal offender” to the list of protected groups under civil-rights statutes, the agency refuses to disclose whether it uses criminal background checks for its own hiring.

As for the professed goal of serving sacred minorities at the expense of white job applicants,

The EEOC is confident that its guidance will boost minority hiring, but studies published in the University of Chicago Legal Forum and the Journal of Law and Economics have found that businesses are much less likely to hire minority applicants when background checks are banned. As the majority of black and Hispanic job applicants have clean legal records, the new EEOC mandate may harm the very groups it purports to help.

As always, Big Government assumes no responsibility for the havoc it inflicts.

Naturally, the EEOC will have no liability for any workplace trouble that results from its new hiring policy.

At least the eagerness of our liberal rulers to punish the law-abiding by giving de facto hiring priority to criminals helps us make sense of their jihad against the Second Amendment. It’s not that they don’t understand that gun laws only affect the law-abiding. It’s just a question of whose side they are on.

Obviously, in a free country a private business would be able to hire whoever it finds most suitable for the job without fear of punishment. Equally obviously, it is not easy to do business in a tyranny run by lunatics. This is why our standard of living will continue to decline so as long as liberals are in charge.

On a tip from Varla. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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