Better in their words…

“I’m from the Democrat Party, er, Government, and I’m here to help protect you.”

I think the Left needs to figure out that they are not addressing root causes…
==========
Are criminal background checks racist? That’s the startling new legal theory that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission unveiled this week in lawsuits against employers. It’s another example of how President Obama’s appointees are using regulation to achieve policy goals they can’t get through Congress.

On Tuesday the EEOC accused retailer Dollar General DG -0.04% and a U.S. unit of German car maker BMW BMW.XE +1.26% of violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by using criminal checks as part of their employment decisions. The logic? Blacks have higher conviction rates than whites, and therefore criminal checks discriminate against blacks.

The EEOC alleges that BMW discriminated against blacks because it screened contractors in South Carolina for convictions for “Murder, Assault & Battery, Rape, Child Abuse, Spousal Abuse (Domestic Violence), Manufacturing of Drugs, Distribution of Drugs, [and] Weapons Violations,” and more blacks than whites are convicted of those crimes.

The suit says 70 black BMW contractors and 18 non-black contractors had criminal convictions, and the company declined to hire them. The suit seeks redress, such as hiring the plaintiffs, back pay, legal costs and more, but only for the black contractors.

In its Dollar General suit, the agency says that 10% of blacks and 7% of non-black applicants failed the retailer’s criminal screening. The EEOC calls that three-percentage-point difference a “gross disparity” that is “statistically significant” enough to qualify as discrimination.
Related Video

Jones Day attorney and former EEOC general counsel Eric Dreiband on the government targeting companies that use criminal background checks to screen applicants. Photo: Associated Press

We would have thought that criminal checks discriminate against criminals, regardless of race, creed, gender or anything else. Such criminal checks are legal and have long been part of the hiring process at many companies. You can argue that criminals deserve a second chance in life, or even a third or fourth, but business owners and managers ought to be able to decide if they want to take the risk of hiring felons.

The EEOC suit is part of the Administration’s larger effort to redefine racism in America by using statistics, rather than individual intent or evidence. The Justice and Housing Departments have rewritten their rules and punished banks and counties like Westchester, N.Y., based on disparate statistical measures of lending and zoning. The EEOC signaled its plans in April last year when it rewrote its enforcement strategy, declaring that “an employer’s evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact.”

Mull that one over. Even if a company has a racially diverse workforce, it can still be sued if its applicant pool doesn’t meet the EEOC’s statistical tests. So a retailer that decides it would rather not have proven thieves manning its cash registers could be guilty of racism if the convicted thieves in its applicant pool are disproportionately minority.

Jacqueline Berrien, a former NAACP attorney who is now EEOC chairman, has been waiting for a Democratic majority on the five-member commission to gin up this agenda. Outlawing credit checks in hiring may be next on the agenda. The next three years are going to be a full-employment opportunity for labor lawyers, if not for the rest of America.

A version of this article appeared June 15, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Banning Background Checks.
Review & Outlook: Banning Background Checks – WSJ.com.