Rights and Disparate Impact

~ Clarissa

To our favorite discussion about rights:

Do you have the right not to hire people with a criminal record?

The answer is that if criminal record checks have a disparate impact – meaning they weed out more people of one race than another – then you don’t have that right.

Please note that nobody is even trying to allege that the company acted based on racist reasons:

Federal officials said they do not allege Sheetz was motivated by racial animus, but take issue with the way the chain uses criminal background checks to screen job seekers. The company was sued under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion and national origin.

But disparate impact is illegal irrespective of your motives. If, for example, more black students than white fail your course, that’s disparate impact and you have violated the Civil Rights Act. Do you have the right to maintain academic standards in your courses? No, you don’t if there’s disparate impact. The right of people not to be disparately impacted trumps your right to grade based on the principle of equality. We had a university lawyer explain this to us. Any rights you imagine you have are a fiction if there’s no legal entity that defends them.

This began in 1964 but in the past decade or so it’s been mushrooming like never before. Everybody should become familiar with disparate impact because it’s much more useful than abstract prattling about rights.

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Published by Clarissa

14 thoughts on “Rights and Disparate Impact”

  2. This all seems bad.

    My reaction to all of this is “well, I need to avoid positions of leadership, power and influence”. I’m about 10 years younger than you and in a technical field and have managed to hide away in obscurity. I don’t have the emotional stamina to stand up to bullshit. But it is interesting to me that reading blog posts like yours has the effect of curtailing my professional ambitions.

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      1. Thank you. That was a much kinder reply than I might have given. I might say (to myself) something along the lines of “well if you can’t take the heat then yes, you should avoid leadership positions. So everything is as it should be”.

        Do you have any ideas of how someone can stand up to this sort of thing without having their career destroyed? I still don’t want leadership or power but might unwittingly end up having it and having to handle the responsibility somehow.

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        1. Well, what I do is lie, prevaricate and pretend. For example, I hire the best qualified candidate and then write obligatory missives to the EEOC explaining why there wasn’t anybody blacker available for the job. I used to be left-wing, so I know all the lingo, and I can spin the PC yarn as well as anybody.

          It’s like in the USSR. We all pretended to believe but all quietly sabotaged. And then the regime fell apart one day.

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        2. Yes, and I’ve said it before here.

          They want to have their own standards, so let them and then judge them by those standards.

          Then bring in people who will judge those standards as the fraud they are.

          Everyone involved in perpetuating fraud based on those bullshit standards then gets the savage beatdowns they deserve, possibly with you being one of those administering beatdowns.

          For the fraud especially, of course.

          You don’t get respect from Leftists without a body count.

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  3. Still trying to work through the logical implications here, and it feels like:

    1. Disparate impact on companies by size. MultiNatConglomInc will still be able to get around it with expensive lawyers and weaselly workarounds. Smaller companies will not.
    2. Small Co. will either fold for want of being able to hire anyone, or be forced to switch to an awkward model where they have no employees, only “independent contractors” who look and act just like employees, but without any of the protections that employees enjoy. This probably increases costs and liabilities, and makes Small Co. even less competitive in a world where MultiNatConglomInc offers any of the same products or services. This has happened in a lot of places already due to wage laws and benefits requirements. This gives it another hard shove in the same direction.
    3. Yay, that much harder to get an entry-level job.

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    1. “Smaller companies will not.”

      And ours did not.

      “Small Co. will either fold for want of being able to hire anyone …”

      Skills limits in hiring not associated with location limits were already a thing.

      This doomed expansion even more than being stuck in my warehouse.

      “… This has happened in a lot of places already due to wage laws and benefits requirements …”

      And so a thieving employee did us a favour because we were able to deal with it right then, eat the loss, eat the sunken costs, and terminate a lease while only having to buy out two employees with better than decent severance and bonus packages.

      We got lucky in a sense that the fraud went so deep, and everyone shown the evidence decided they would accept the limited two week severance and NDA enforcement versus not getting a paycheque and possibly going to jail.

      Except for the thief who skipped town and was summarily terminated with cause as a no-show.

      How very convenient.

      So Small Co folded because the company as a producing asset was already compromised, and there were still assets to negotiate with.

      “… that much harder to get an entry-level job …”

      Which most of these weren’t, but without these kinds of jobs to move on to, every job becomes an entry-level job in which you stay stuck for however long it takes until it ceases to exist.

      And actually Small Co USA was not competitive with Small Co Japan or Small Co Singapore or even Small Co Mexico, because I got to meet people doing some of the same things we were doing, at much lower costs, with less drag and at least comparable results.

      Then we hired a forensic accountant to locate the drag, and the rest is history (of a forced liquidation and a bankruptcy without the intent to reorganise).

      And that’s why I’m saying that the veneer of incompetence is merely giving shade to all of the fraud hidden within.

      “Disparate impact” is yet another form of this fraud.

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        1. Think of it like being in the executive gift level fruit business with £1000 watermelons that are essentially perfect, but you can’t grow them to compete with Japan (who owns that business and have their laws set to work with it), with Singapore (where there are trade contacts for buyers who want non-Japanese products), or with Mexico (where the chemicals you are being forced to us to create a domestic product you export 100% with zero domestic consumers happen not to be legal, and so they clear that basic hurdle you don’t).

          Not exactly the same situation, but a decent concrete example that’s a parallel.

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          1. Joel Salatin wrote a whole book called *Everything I Want to Do is Illegal* that covers how ridiculous it is in the US, as a small producer, to try to sell meat, poultry, eggs, or dairy, from your own farm.

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  5. Pingback: The History of Disparate Impact – Clarissa's Blog

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