human resources

Death by HR Introduction: HR Pushes Damaging Regulations Into the Enterprise
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[The Introduction from Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now for Kindle and in trade paperback.]

Introduction

This book is about the new Age of Incompetence, with brain-dead, unaccountable employees holding sinecures at the heart of our government agencies and regulated institutions like banks and hospitals, protected by affirmative action and union policies. The rot is spreading as pressure from state and federal regulation of companies has increased, empowering an internal compliance bureaucracy — Human Resources (HR) — that has devalued the best job candidates and employees and promoted affirmative action and diversity over team productivity.

The result has been ever-more-costly failures and a steep decline in organizational performance. From the mortgage meltdown that brought down the world’s economy in 2008, to the disastrous launch of the healthcare.gov website for Obamacare, major segments of business and government in the US have grown more expensive and less competent over the past few decades. Billions of dollars of waste in government contracts for IT projects, boondoggle weapons systems, and deadly service failures at the VA are in the news every day. Public schools are widely seen as mediocre, and in the poorest urban districts they are failing to provide a decent education for the students who need good schools the most to make up for bad family backgrounds. Costs for regulated services like schools, colleges, medical insurance, drugs, courts, prisons, and infrastructure like roads and bridges rise far faster than inflation, while time to complete major projects stretches out to decades, and many fail completely and are cancelled after billions have been spent. And the rot is spreading as government pushes businesses to adopt similar employment policies, with HR enforcing government mandates that compromise competitiveness and give overseas companies the advantage.

This book will trace the factors that have hobbled growth and damaged organizational competence. Government regulation has led to HR departments that actively sabotage the hiring of the best candidates for jobs, with by-the-book mediocrities placed in positions of responsibility.

Silicon Valley and the tech industries are the next targets. If you’re a manager at a tech company, I’ll suggest some ways to protect your people from HR and its emphasis on credentials and affirmative action (AA) over the best fit for a position. Corporate leaders need to be sure their HR departments are managed to prevent infiltration by staff more interested in correct politics than winning products. And I’ll show why appeasement of diversity activists is a dangerous strategy that may make your organization a target for further extortionate demands….

Affirmative action policies have placed mediocrities at major decision points in most large companies, government agencies, and highly-regulated institutions like schools and hospitals. A small percentage of deadwood can be routed around, but over time feedback effects from the generalized lack of accountability and lowered standards for performance cripple the institution. This is the cause of the failure and extreme cost overruns of almost all large government projects and a tolerance for incompetence so long as policy manuals are followed to the letter. This effect is largest in government and public education, but also visible in larger companies where HR departments are coming to be staffed by progressives who believe in removing non-progressive thoughts and people from the workplace. In high tech, women and minorities dominate HR in part because companies wanted to balance their male-and-Asian-heavy engineering staff to make their numbers look better, but now are just realizing they’ve created an internal enemy to product quality and excellence in staffing engineering teams. (A corporate manager comments: “How do you know HR is lying? Their lips are moving…”)

This book will focus on the situation in the US, which was until recently more resistant to the bureaucratic disease and thus had a healthier economy and a more dynamic labor market than Europe. The onset of top-down sclerosis by Federal regulation and micromanagement has reduced US growth to the same stagnant levels seen in Europe, for much the same reason: educated by public schools to believe they need permission to do anything, young people stop trying to do anything, and wait for someone to help them. The increasing numbers of untouchable diversity hires in positions of responsibility has inhibited accountability, and the inability to fire employees after even the most egregious malfeasance has spread from civil service and union shops into major corporations —s ince some cannot be held accountable for incompetence, no one is; and the continuing presence of employees who coworkers know are shirkers, incompetents, or even criminals reduces the morale of those who are good at their jobs and work hard. The dysfunction varies by industry and company, with the worst-hit in heavily-regulated sectors like banking, education, and healthcare, where government either controls every element of the business or pays for most of the product. Sectors which until recently were relatively free of deadwood, like high tech, are now under attack by the diversity activists, who want more hiring of less qualified people to make high tech workforces more representative — which would mean discriminating against better candidates who are white, Asian, Indian, male, etc.

This book will also look at a few other countries that have tried various forms of affirmative action policies to demonstrate that while these places are culturally very different, the divisive and socially damaging long-term effects of AA preferences are visible in every country where it has been in place for longer than one generation.

Affirmative action — which substitutes the lower standard of “good enough” for “best” in hiring new employees, setting the bar low enough so that affirmative action hires can meet it instead of seeking out the most qualified candidate — is not the only labor regulation crippling organizational productivity. State and federal regulation and micromanagement of economic activity continues to increase, complicating and delaying every public and many private projects. Whole sectors of the economy are weighed down by regulation; new medical devices and drugs cost $billions to get through corrupt and scientifically-antiquated FDA studies and approvals processes, which results in high prices for new medical technology. Routine services like dental cleanings and hair braiding are illegal in many states unless done under supervision of a cartel of state-certified practitioners; four states even outlaw residential decorating services unless licensed. Hazards of toppling armoires aside, the state is easily captured by motivated business groups to outlaw new competition for their business, and under the pretense of protecting consumers, allowing professional cartels to charge much more for services.

Labor laws are similarly gamed by politically-influential unions and power-seeking bureaucrats. Minimum wage laws outlaw lower wages for unproven or new workers, and restrictions on firing as in Europe make it less likely companies will take a chance on hiring a full-time worker rather than a temp or contractor. The long-term result of Euro-style labor protection is Euro-style high unemployment, especially in young, inexperienced workers, who are thereby kept from ever gaining the experience that would make them valuable enough to hire despite the additional rules and costs imposed by the laws. People accept that education costs money and that students may be paid less for internships or even pay outright for classes, but forget that most occupational skills are acquired in the workplace, in the first years of employment. By outlawing lower wages and at-will employment, labor laws are keeping young people from important learning experiences and ruining their chance to start on a career ladder.

Until the Roosevelt administration and the New Deal, the Supreme Court had held back many attempts to regulate private business, ruling them unconstitutional overreaches. But after Roosevelt threatened to pack the court with new justices who would approve his regulatory agenda, the Supreme Court bowed to his wishes. In a series of cases, the newly Progressive-leaning Court expanded the Commerce Clause to allow federal regulation of almost all economic activity. In Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), the court ruled that a farmer could be fined for growing wheat on his own land for his own animals’ consumption because he would otherwise have had to purchase wheat in the market, which a 1938 agricultural control law regulated. After this, the court rarely found any Federal regulation of contracts or commerce to be unconstitutional, despite the clear intent of the framers that such Federal power over commerce was intended to prevent states from creating trade barriers and discriminating against the products of other US states.

As a result, laws and regulations on commerce of all kinds — and labor specifically — have expanded, and the staffing levels of Human Resources departments and administrations at colleges and hospitals have ballooned to meet bureaucratic requirements. Federal fingers are now in every pie, wasting resources and deadening initiative, since a lawsuit or negative attention from the NLRB, EEOC, Dept. of Education, HHS, EPA, and other enforcement agencies can destroy or damage a company or institution. HR and administrative staff approve of the progressive control agenda—which gives them power and status—and when free to drift leftward serve as an internal fifth column dedicated to enforcing progressive standards on their own organization and its workforce.

Companies serving an international market find themselves battling foreign companies who don’t have as many burdens, especially in Asia. The US advantage of a productive workforce and innovative technology is gradually worn down by the time and money spent fighting bureaucrats. Mediocre managements take current rewards for themselves but ignore the future, eventually failing. Foreign companies take over markets, one by one, as US companies dragged down by unions and mediocre key employees lose revenues and eventually abandon markets.

Governments have expanded the areas they control while the Civil Service, union, and affirmative action rules imposed on their workforces have reduced their effectiveness in their most critical functions. From deaths caused by bureaucratic malfeasance at the VA to killer cops rarely punished and kept on the payroll by the efforts of police unions, this lack of accountability makes it difficult to remove incompetent or criminal public employees and makes it impossible for even motivated elected officials to reform public services. The rising debt and costs for every public project mean failing services, rampant injustice, and decaying infrastructure are not being addressed. As a result, US competitiveness is declining vs. countries with better-managed public services. And public anger and cynicism as the years pass and each new group of elected officials fails to fix any of the problems they promised to fix is leading to a dangerous disregard for the law and a desire for a dictator who will sweep aside the checks and balances of a Republic.

Because there are so many examples of malfeasance and incompetence in government’s control of commerce and labor regulations, I was forced to leave most of that material for the next book, which will focus on government. Entire books have been written about the costly failures of the Drug War, public schools, affirmative action, and police militarization. This book will focus on the creeping spread of this atmosphere of consequence-free failure. The hubris of central planners and their capture by special interests, acting in concert with well-meaning but naive do-gooders who think they can vote their way to a better world, has brought us the diseases of socialism by taking away authority and accountability that let businesses succeed or fail. The pleasant-sounding ideal of equality of outcome — which killed hundreds of millions of people as the activating principle of Marxism-Communism — is actually the enemy of individual freedom, accountability, and achievement. The decline of excellence as a primary goal leading to profit and growth has not come because people like failure and mediocrity, but because they were sold a fairy tale about how government could make everything fairer and make everyone happy through the workings of laws and regulations. The result has been a lot more unhappiness and civil strife as the unintended consequences have swamped whatever good was intended. And the level of hypocrisy has risen as politicians promote the message that everyone is a victim and that someone else — “the 1%,” corporations, Republicans, foreigners, Muslims, blacks, the Koch Brothers, the Jews, whoever works as a scapegoat—is responsible for keeping them down.

High tech, one sector where the US led the world and generated immense new wealth, has now been targeted as the next area to be regulated. Activists and demagogues are attracted by money, and with more than half of the US private economy now controlled by government regulators, it was inevitable the parasites would look toward the remaining healthy sectors for their next fix. Calls for diversity quotas in tech company workforces, video game characters, and open-source software projects are early warning signs. HR departments in most tech companies serve as the political commissars of regulation, and HR departments in tech are staffed by lower-paid employees who have little understanding of the technology but a lot of interest in screening out even the best prospective employees who don’t fit the narrow diversity mold. Managers who want the best teams and the fastest, coolest products are resisting these HR apparatchiks, and I’ll show what you can do about it if you work in tech.

The next battlefield after high tech is discretion in hiring — which the activists believe must be limited to force employers to hire any candidate “qualified” for a job as soon as they apply. Only a few radicals are proposing this kind of blind hiring now, but continuing successes in getting firms to bow to their diversity demands will result in a list of new demands. Seattle has already passed an ordinance requiring landlords to rent apartments to the first applicant who qualifies — next what counts as qualified will come under their control, and government-sponsored Section 8 and protected class tenants will be deemed qualified no matter what their credit reports and criminal records show. And similar movements in hiring — supposedly to prevent discrimination by eliminating management choice of who to employ — are coming soon.

There are many people working hard in HR to promote the interests of their organization, but their efforts are often blunted by the prevailing HR culture that substitutes buzzwords and feel-good social goals for promotion of productivity and excellence:

…Most HR organizations have ghettoized themselves literally to the brink of obsolescence. They are competent at the administrivia of pay, benefits, and retirement, but companies increasingly are farming those functions out to contractors who can handle such routine tasks at lower expense. What’s left is the more important strategic role of raising the reputational and intellectual capital of the company — but HR is, it turns out, uniquely unsuited for that. Here’s why:

HR people aren’t the sharpest tacks in the box. We’ll be blunt: If you are an ambitious young thing newly graduated from a top college or B-school with your eye on a rewarding career in business, your first instinct is not to join the human-resources dance. (At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, which arguably boasts the nation’s top faculty for organizational issues, just 1.2% of 2004 grads did so.) Says a management professor at one leading school: “The best and the brightest don’t go into HR.”

Who does? Intelligent people, sometimes—but not businesspeople. “HR doesn’t tend to hire a lot of independent thinkers or people who stand up as moral compasses,” says Garold L. Markle, a longtime human-resources executive at Exxon and Shell Offshore who now runs his own consultancy. Some are exiles from the corporate mainstream: They’ve fared poorly in meatier roles—but not poorly enough to be fired. For them, and for their employers, HR represents a relatively low-risk parking spot.

Others enter the field by choice and with the best of intentions, but for the wrong reasons. They like working with people, and they want to be helpful—noble motives that thoroughly tick off some HR thinkers. “When people have come to me and said, ‘I want to work with people,’ I say, ‘Good, go be a social worker,'” says Arnold Kanarick, who has headed human resources at the Limited and, until recently, at Bear Stearns. “HR isn’t about being a do-gooder. It’s about how do you get the best and brightest people and raise the value of the firm.”[1]

[1] “Why We Hate HR: In a knowledge economy, companies with the best talent win. And finding, nurturing, and developing that talent should be one of the most important tasks in a corporation. So why does human resources do such a bad job—and how can we fix it?” Fast Company, August 1, 2005. http://www.fastcompany.com/53319/why-we-hate-hr

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat…. It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More reading:

A Clinton Christmas Carol
“High Tech Under Diversity Pressure
Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind
HireVue, Video Interviews, and AI Job Searches
“Death by HR” – Diversity Programs Don’t Work

Ban the Box - photo credit PBS

Death by HR – Ban the Box, Credit Scores, Current Salaries: The Road to Hiring Blind

So corporate hiring today is a mess, and about to get worse as progressives try to force companies to give up some of the few tools they have to disqualify criminal or unreliable applicants—with the usual noble motivations, of course. We’ll go over these efforts, then look at a new Seattle ordinance designed to limit discrimination in apartment rentals by forcing landlords to accept the first applicant who “qualifies,” which will evolve (if not pushed back) to limit allowed requirements until landlords essentially will be forced to take almost anyone. This idea of forcing acceptance of applicants will most likely soon be applied to hiring, as the social engineers gradually reduce any freedoms a business manager might have so that their client population can enjoy the benefits of being hardworking, reliable, self-controlled citizens without actually demonstrating any of those qualities. If US labor law ever reaches that late stage equality-of-outcome decadence, productivity will crumble, much as it did in the old USSR where jobs were similarly guaranteed and handed out based on pull. This kind of micromanagement of free-market employment practices is typical of progressives—to achieve the worthy goal (in this case, limiting invidious discrimination), they try to limit the use of management discretion in operating a business by passing unenforceable laws that tend to do more harm than good.

Progressives are working hard to outlaw use of credit scores or criminal records to screen job candidates. This is, of course, because bad records on either tend to identify less trustworthy, less reliable people that employers quite reasonably want to avoid hiring. The campaign to outlaw application questions about criminal records is called “Ban the Box,” and this catchy name means applications that include a box to be checked if the applicant has a criminal record are to be banned by law. Most such laws passed at state and local levels only ban the question on applications for government jobs or government contractors, since the legality of going further at the local level is questionable. But moves are afoot to make it part of Federal equal employment regulations.

It’s true that not every candidate who fails such screening would be a bad employee. Both ex-prisoners and bad credit risks might well have reformed, with the black marks on their record not indicating their current state of trustworthiness—and a wise employer might consider them by looking deeper into their background and directly questioning them on how they may have learned from their experiences. But employers who are going to rely on the keeping of promises to show up on time, work hard, and not steal from their employer are not wrong to think these are factors to consider.

Further, studies of “Ban the Box” laws show that they can actually harm the minorities they are intended to help. An employer who loses the ability to check for a criminal record may be more likely to act on prejudice—after all, prejudice and adverse stereotyping are strongest where information is limited. Being able to pass a criminal record check enhances a minority candidate’s chance of being viewed as a good risk for the employer. The most recent study demonstrated this effect:

“Ban-the-Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging statistical discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant’s race. To investigate this possibility as well as the effects of race and criminal records on employer callback rates, we sent approximately 15,000 fictitious online job applications to employers in New Jersey and New York City, in waves before and after each jurisdiction’s adoption of BTB policies. Our causal effect estimates are based on a triple-differences design, which exploits the fact that many businesses’ applications did not ask about records even before BTB and were thus unaffected by the law.

Our results confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment, but they also support the concern that BTB policies encourage statistical discrimination on the basis of race. Overall, white applicants received 23% more callbacks than similar black applicants (38% more in New Jersey; 6% more in New York City; we also find that the white advantage is much larger in whiter neighborhoods). Employers that ask about criminal records are 62% more likely to call back an applicant if he has no record (45% in New Jersey; 78% in New York City)—an effect that BTB compliance necessarily eliminates. However, we find that the race gap in callbacks grows dramatically at the BTB-affected companies after the policy goes into effect. Before BTB, white applicants to BTB-affected employers received about 7% more callbacks than similar black applicants, but BTB increases this gap to 45%.[1]

Most of these laws are presented as preventing pre-screening; the employer may still look into criminal records after deciding to offer the candidate a job. But the clear trend is to make ex-criminal status a protected class and outlaw discrimination on that basis. Another paper suggests employers are more likely to avoid even taking applications from minority candidates if these laws are in place, exercising a form of passive resistance that is hard to prevent:

Removing information about job applicants’ criminal histories [through Ban The Box (BTB) laws) could lead employers who don’t want to hire ex-offenders to try to guess who the ex-offenders are, and avoid interviewing them. In particular, employers might avoid interviewing young, low-skilled, black and Hispanic men when criminal records are not observable. This would worsen employment outcomes for these already-disadvantaged groups. In this paper, we use variation in the details and timing of state and local BTB policies to test BTB’s effects on employment for various demographic groups. We find that BTB policies decrease the probability of being employed by 3.4 percentage points (5.1%) for young, low-skilled black men, and by 2.3 percentage points (2.9%) for young, low-skilled Hispanic men. These findings support the hypothesis that when an applicant’s criminal history is unavailable, employers statistically discriminate against demographic groups that are likely to have a criminal record.[2]

Not screening hires for criminal records also subjects employers to big negligence awards when consumers are victimized by unscreened employees:

“Consider these allegations from a 2012 Virginia case,” Leeson said. “The employer hired a person to work in a hotel, and allegedly did not perform a background check or ask about the person’s criminal history. The person had previously been convicted of a felony sex crime. The person thereafter raped an 18-year-old hotel maid on her third day on the job. The maid sued the hotel for negligent hire. The case settled with the hotel agreeing to pay $675,000 to the former maid.” Ultimately, Leeson said, “I believe it is reasonable and prudent for employers to ask about prior convictions as one factor in the overall evaluation of the applicant.”[3]

But the laws are spreading rapidly and being applied to private employers as well:

Nine states — Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont — have removed the conviction history question on job applications for private employers, which advocates embrace as the next step in the evolution of these policies.

The majority of ban-the-box laws apply only to public employers, but blanket ban-the-box laws impacting all sectors are on the rise. Many advocates embrace private-sector ban-the-box laws as the “next step in the evolution of these policies,” according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), a worker advocacy organization….

There are also various city and county ban-the-box laws around the country that apply to private employers…

Many ban-the-box policies exempt employers that have 10 employees or less, but some, such as Minnesota’s, do not. And while many private employers have balked at ban-the-box policies, at least two large retailers have jumped on board. National retailers Target and Wal-Mart no longer ask about an applicant’s conviction record during the initial phase of the hiring process, according to NELP. In order to comply with the 2013 Minnesota law, Minneapolis-based Target announced it was eliminating the box on its applications. Wal-Mart took that action in 2010.[4]

So if your area doesn’t already have a BTB law, it soon will.

Now to move on to the use of credit reports to screen candidates: credit reports are already regulated by Federal law, and since they aren’t cheap, companies rarely use them to pre-screen candidates. But they are widely used in the final stages of hiring decisions:

Employers get a shortened version of your credit report that excludes any information that would violate equal employment opportunity laws, explains Rod Griffin, director of public education for credit bureau Experian. An employer report also does not list “soft” inquiries, which do show up on the report an individual receives….

According to a 2012 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management, 47% of employers check potential employees’ credit reports as part of the hiring process. The same study found that the two most common reasons for reviewing job candidates’ credit reports are to decrease the likelihood of theft and embezzlement and reduce legal liability for negligent hiring. According to an article in The New York Times, which cited the same survey:

“Most businesses use credit checks only to screen for certain positions, but one in eight, the survey found, does a credit check before every hire.”

But it’s important to remember that your employer can’t check your credit report without your consent; you must give written permission. Also, an employer won’t be seeing personal information, like your account numbers, when he or she reviews your report. The modified version that’s provided takes steps to protect your privacy.

Also, 11 states have laws prohibiting employer credit checks and/or restricting how this information can be used in the hiring process. If you live in one of these states, an employer credit check may not be something you need to worry about.[5]

Many employers are failing to follow the existing laws on use of credit reports, and as a result are getting hit with multimillion-dollar class action lawsuits:

Last year saw an increasing number of FCRA class-action lawsuits filed and settled for millions of dollars. FCRA violations can range from not making legally required disclosures to not following proper adverse action procedures.

“Not a month has gone by in over a year when there hasn’t been a major FCRA class action on background checks, and that trend has already continued into January,” said Nick Fishman, executive vice president at EmployeeScreenIQ.

We may see an “explosion” of FCRA class-action suits against employers and background screening firms as plaintiffs’ attorneys become more familiar with the law and the whole area of background checks, said Rosen. The financial recovery can be enormous—up to $1,000 per person in damages.

“Given the large statutory damages at issue, the promise of attorneys’ fees and punitive damages, along with the fact that there is an open question as to whether an individual need be actually harmed to bring an action, these claims will undoubtedly continue,” Devata agreed. Many FCRA claims have nothing to do with a person being harmed, but instead are the result of a mere technicality in the law, she added. …Employers should be aware that taking an adverse action—terminating an existing employee, rescinding a job offer to an applicant, denying a promotion—based on a consumer report “requires them to engage in a multistep process and requires close consideration of timed requirements,” said Do. “Bottom line, if negative information comes back on a background check, an employer simply can’t just pick up the phone and say ‘You’re not getting the job.’ ” Failing to provide a copy of the consumer report, failing to furnish a copy of the FCRA summary of rights document, and failing to provide the opportunity to dispute a report’s inaccuracies or errors, are common allegations, said Do.

These suits are the most troubling because they are the most avoidable, said Fishman. “These laws aren’t that hard to follow. Employers need to continually audit their processes and make sure that they comply with the law.”

It’s important to train incoming HR staff on the FCRA. “In many cases, with high turnover in HR departments, the sufficient training that was provided when an employer first signs on with a screening firm may not be adequately conveyed to new members. The likelihood that an oversight may result when an undertrained staff member fails to follow protocol then increases,” said Do.[7]

Notice how a seemingly well-motivated law not only removes hiring discretion, but with the help in this case of class action lawyers (who are part of the political class feeding off private industry with the help of the pols who write the laws), requires hiring more and more HR staff and consultants to administer and train for it. Every regulation imposed on employers increases non-productive staff and budget, and decreases the freedom to seek out the best employees without fear of government punishment. Every gain in “fairness” imposed by law costs everyone twice as much in lost growth and opportunity.

And banning use of credit checks in hiring has the same perverse effect as “Ban The Box” — it hurts minorities:

One of the hottest ideas among lawmakers right now is to ban employers from running credit checks on job applicants. Since 2007, eleven states, as well as Chicago and New York City, have passed such laws. Supporters of these restrictions often frame the issue as a civil rights problem. In particular, they say, credit checks impede employment among minorities, who disproportionately have low credit scores.

…But a new study from Robert Clifford, an economist at the Boston Fed, and Daniel Shoag, an assistant professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, finds that when employers are prohibited from looking into people’s financial history, something perverse happens: African-Americans become more likely to be unemployed relative to others….

Why did black unemployment go up?

To understand how banning credit checks can lead to unforeseen repercussions, consider the problem from the employer’s perspective. A single job opening these days can get hundreds of applications. Since hiring managers can’t interview every candidate, they need some way to narrow the field. Filtering out people with bad credit helps them bring the number of applicants down to a manageable size. But if employers can’t look into a job-seeker’s financial history, they try something else.

“Employers have many screening measures to narrow down who they want to hire,” Shoag says. “If you take one away, they’ll put more weight on the others.”

That’s exactly what seemed to happen in places that outlawed employer credit checks. Looking at 74 million job listings between 2007 and 2013, Clifford and Shoag found that employers started to become pickier, especially in cities where there were a lot of workers with low credit scores. If a credit-check ban went into effect, job postings were more likely to ask for a bachelor’s degree, and to require additional years of experience.

There are other ways that employers could have also become more discerning, Shoag says. They might have started to rely on referrals or recommendations to make sure that applicants were high-quality. In the absence of credit information to establish trustworthiness, they may even have fallen back on racial stereotypes to screen candidates. The researchers couldn’t measure these tactics, but they’re possibilities.

Any of these reasons might explain one of the study’s strangest findings. In states that passed a credit-check ban, unemployment for African-Americans rose by about one percent compared to unemployment in other states and among other demographic groups. This remained true after controlling for factors like education, age, and gender.

… In the absence of that information, employers had to rely more on other clues about the quality of applicants, including their education and experience levels, but also, perhaps, their interview skills or their recommendations. Whatever the new criteria were, they seem to have put black applicants at a disadvantage.

“This reflects a general movement of legislators monkeying around with the hiring process without thinking about the consequences,” Shoag says.[8]

The latest in efforts to restrict information available to hiring companies is the so-far-not-cleverly-named movement to ban asking any questions about salary history. The theory here is that current and past salary history can be used to hold back women, since a new employer may well offer an increase based on the supposedly lower salaries women make under the yoke of discrimination. The practical need for both applicant and employer to discover whether they are even close to a negotiating range is, of course, not considered, because the appearance of helping women make better salaries is all that counts. Now employers may spend considerable effort to decide on a candidate only to discover the salary they were prepared to offer is far too low to interest the candidate.

Massachusetts was the first state to pass such a law.[9] But theirs goes further, attempting to enshrine the concept of comparable worth—even different jobs with similar labor and standards are supposed to pay the same. This was in response to a suit from largely female cafeteria workers paid just over half of what janitors in the same school system made; the obvious difference in working conditions (social and clean vs. nonsocial and dirty) which explain the relative attractiveness of the positions, and thus the pay differential, seem to be beyond the politicians. This subjective standard will occupy court time and allow more lawyers to extract profitable settlements for themselves.
Meanwhile, attempts to outlaw salary questions at the Federal level are ongoing:

Under the Pay Equity for All Act of 2016 (H.R. 6030), the U.S. Department of Labor would be able to assess fines up to $10,000 against employers who violate the law by asking questions about an applicant’s salary history. Additionally, prospective or current employees would be able to bring a private lawsuit against an employer who violated the law and could receive up to $10,000 in damages plus attorney fees….

Although many employers may not intend to discriminate on the basis of gender, race or ethnicity, asking for prior salary information before offering an applicant a job can have a discriminatory effect in the workplace that begins or reinforces the wage gap, according to a news release announcing the bill.[10]

Women need a Big Brother on their side to have a chance at negotiating a fair salary for themselves, and the Party of Government is happy to provide one. Or at least pretend to.


[1] “Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Statistical Discrimination: A Field Experiment,” by Amanda Y. Agan (Princeton University – Department of Economics) and Sonja B. Starr (University of Michigan Law School), U of Michigan Law & Econ Research Paper No. 16-012, June 14, 2016. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795795
[2] “Does ‘Ban the Box’ Help or Hurt Low-Skilled Workers? Statistical Discrimination and Employment Outcomes When Criminal Histories are Hidden,” by Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen, NBER Working Paper No. 22469, July 2016. http://nber.org/papers/w22469?sy=469
[3] “Ban-the-Box Movement Goes Viral,” by Roy Maurer, SHRM, 2016. https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/risk-management/Pages/Ban-the-Box-Movement-Viral.aspx
[4] Maurer
[5] “Your Employer Won’t Be Looking at Your Credit Score—Here’s Why,” by Lindsay Konsko, Nerdwallet, August 1, 2016. Starts by saying employers don’t look at credit scores, then segues to how they actually look at credit reports. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/finance/credit-score-employer-checking/
[6] “The Use of Credit Reports in Employment Background Screening,” by Lester Rosen, CEO, Employment Screening Resources, and Kerstin Bagus, Director Global Compliance, LexisNexis Screening Solutions Inc., 2010. http://www.esrcheck.com/file/ESR-LN_The-Use-of-Credit-Reports-for-Employment-Background-Screening.pdf
[7] “Know Before You Hire: 2015 Employment Screening Trends,” by Roy Maurer, SHRM, January 27, 2015. https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/2015-employment-screening-trends.aspx
[8] “The law was supposed to reduce discrimination. But it made hiring more racially biased,” by Jeff Guo, Washington Post, March 23, 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/the-law-was-supposed-to-reduce-discrimination-but-it-made-hiring-more-racially-biased/
[9] “Does new law mean real pay equity for women? Not quite,” by Shirley Leung, Boston Globe, August 4, 2016. https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2016/08/04/things-know-about-massachusetts-equal-pay-law/uuiduzYp7EyiIBhxt14pSJ/story.html
[10] “Bill Banning Salary History Questions Goes Before House.” by Kathy Gurchiek, SHRM HR Today, Sep 16, 2016. https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/bill-banning-salary-history-questions-goes-before-house.aspx

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[From Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations,  available now in Kindle and trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. Here’s the condensed version; view the entire review here.

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits… HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool… All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

More reading on other topics:

More Reading:

Death by HR: EEOC Incompetence and the Coming Idiocracy
Corrupt Feedback Loops: Public Employee Unions
Unrealistic Expectations: Liberal Arts Woman and Amazon Men
Stable is Boring? “Psychology Today” Article on Bad Boyfriends

“Death by HR” – Reactions

The first few days after publication inspired a few postings on well-known sites. Dr. Helen Smith read the copy I sent her husband, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, and had these observations:

Kinnison says that if the culture of your business “…is founded on creating excellent products or services that will win in the marketplace, hiring people who have other goals — righting past wrongs, molding fellow employees’ thought processes to conform to their own, shielding everyone from harsh realities to make them (temporarily) feel good and important — will dilute your company’s culture, and networks of employees who support each other’s willingness to call in outside legal or political forces to win internal battles will form.”

The book is excellent and gives good advice on how to help your tech company avoid SJWs whose focus is on activism, rather than on getting the best employees who can grow your company.

One commenter (“screamingmimi”) added:

I work for a tech company where just this is starting to happen – it’s the old SJW toe in the door, dontcha know. Recently, a couple of ‘women of color’ have taken it upon themselves to reprimand our management on how lacking in women and other ethnicities our company is. Nevermind that we already pride ourselves on hiring THE BEST PEOPLE FOR THE JOB, regardless of race, creed, color, etc. Of course that’s never enough. So because of that, what’s happened?

Well, we now have mandatory ‘diversity courses’ and a ‘diversity team’ because we simply weren’t diverse enough, and of course, we have to kowtow to everyone’s feelings. And as ever, being ‘diverse’ once again trumps (and kills) skill, knowledge, and experience. Sure, we’ll have a diverse employee group, but this will undoubtedly lead to us losing current clients, and not gaining new ones because we’re hiring based on diversity, and not on capability (and top skillsets — something we require — are already extremely hard to come by in our particular technology field).

I thought our company was different. I thought our company was better than that. I thought our company was above all this petty SJW crap. I was wrong. And it’s made me look at our company — and its management — in a whole new (and quickly dimming) light. While it hasn’t affected our bottom line (yet?), if it starts to accelerate, it could spell trouble for our currently great company. Sad.

An increasingly common story, I’m afraid. Management goes along until it is too late. This is one of the reasons I wrote the book — to give people the historical background to understand why seemingly well-meaning activists can ultimately wreck your enterprise. Resisting them is not racist or misogynist, it’s pro-excellence.

Turning to the Ace of Spades Sunday Morning Bookthread:

Jeb Kinnison, moron author of the “Substrate Wars” series (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3) has written a new book, not a novel, but one that is probably pretty scary. The book is Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations and Jeb tells me, “The book’s thesis is that labor regulations (notably affirmative action, but also all the rest of it) has hurt effectiveness at many workplaces, especially those in government or heavily regulated organizations (education, hospitals, banks…) The Eurodisease is coming here, and the HR departments of large companies are the commissars of the regulators, extending political directives into the workplace and losing sight of the goal of excellence and profitable products. Technology is just the latest pressure point.”

Can anything be done to fight the fungal rot of progressivism in a corporate setting? Kinnison says yes:

“If you’re a manager at a tech company, we’ll suggest some ways to protect your people from HR and its emphasis on credentials and affirmative action (AA) over the best fit for a position. Corporate leaders need to be sure their HR departments are managed to prevent infiltration by staff more interested in correct politics than winning products. And we’ll show why appeasement of diversity activists is a dangerous strategy that may make your organization a target for further extortionate demands.”

Maybe we should send a bunch of copies of this book to the NFL front office.

Vox Day picked up on Dr. Helen’s post and added:

Of course, no one who has read SJWs Always Lie will be even remotely surprised by any of this. The good news is that all of this corporate convergence is creating a whole range of new opportunities as the converged corporations begin to pursue social justice objectives rather than serving their customers. It’s not a question of whether SJWs can ruin a company they converge.

Once they’ve entered, it’s only a question of when.

I have some fundamental differences with Vox Day, but on this subject he is entirely correct. One of the commenters pointed out how the system used to work to identify and train young people who already had good attitudes and aptitude:

32. Thucydides October 17, 2016 1:14 PM

I remember reading Jerry Pournell’s Chaos Manor describing how people could be hired on by companies like Boeing and be guided and trained throughout their careers, rising from the shop floor to become aeronautical engineers.

This was ended by a lawsuit back in the 70’s (going by memory here) where the company in question had an internal promotions and training policy where employees simply had to be high school grads or have a GED and pass a working knowledge test (or something like that) to be considered for promotion. A “diverse” employee who failed the test and was passed over sued, and despite the fact that the company policy was completely objective (the job knowledge was particular for that company, and many white employees also failed the test and were passed over as well), the court ruled in favour of the “diverse” employee because racism.

Since then, companies have devolved the training to the school and university system, and HR has grown explosively to deal with the mountain of paperwork demanded by various bureaucracies, and in better companies, to try and identify the wheat from the chaff (since they are no longer allowed to do so in any normal fashion). Of course, if your enemies are doing the “sorting” in the school system and the HR department, then you’re hooped (as they used to say).

This is a big problem in capital intensive industries, since it is hard to move, but IT should be effectively able to evade, a few coders working in the back of the garage have no overhead to hold them back, and a small enough group dynamic to not need much in the way of HR or Admin. Many companies are actually devolving to that point as an “unexpected” side effect of Obamacare (hire more than 50 people and you are entrapped by the bureaucracy), and we can hope that various techniques like 3D manufacturing will allow small companies to remain nimble and productive among the dinosaurs.

The 1970s did indeed end testing for cognitive skills as job screening. Courts ruled that every test that minority candidates disproportionately failed was discriminatory under the doctrine of “adverse impact.” Testing was replaced by credentials and certifications, removing career ladders for bright young people who did poorly in academic settings — most commonly, young men.

 

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now for Kindle and in trade paperback.]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.

“Death by HR” – Available Now
Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations, available now for Kindle and in trade paperback.]

Two more reviews on Amazon today:

5.0 out of 5 stars
Why I Can’t Get a Job I’m Overqualified for….
By Joseph F. Collinson on October 17, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

Caveat: I received a pre-release copy for review but I have bought a kindle copy and will be getting the paperback to give to friends.

To start off, this book hacked me off. or once, someone has, through careful research and thought, and in concise easy to understand language has explained why the hell our country is falling to pieces. It should have been obvious to someone with my 35 years in the work force in a wide variety of jobs.

I’ve been fighting HR stooges for years and years. Now I know why it I can’t make much forward progress. Why it took six months to hire me as a paramedic for a major health system despite paying hundreds of thousand dollars in overtime to fill shifts that there were no warm bodies available. Why, after three attempts to fill a job I am more than qualified for, I can’t even get much more than a postcard saying “thank you, but no thanks.” Hey, I’m a paramedic, give me minimal training and toss me in, I’ll do just fine.

I now know why LinkedIn is so popular as a way to essentially bypass HR so people can make direct contact with the people who actually do the hiring and establish relationships.

So, if you have been in the workforce for years and are thinking about a new job or have been trying to find one and can’t get anywhere, this book shows you why and how.

5.0 out of 5 stars
A book that every CEO should read.
By John Carlton on October 17, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition

Death By HR is a book that every CEO should read. As should the rest of us. Anybody’s who has been looking for work, or working for an American corporation currently or in the last few years has experienced the lunacy and extreme dysfunction in just about every function related to Human Resources. Death By HR examines why the dysfunction came about and provides the start of a road map to escape the tyranny being imposed on us.

The book does not pull its punches, nor should it. Right from the introduction the book lays out the case for what has happened in all too much of American business.

 

On the first day of release, it reached the top of Amazon’s “Hot New Releases” list for Human Resources:

Death by HR hits #1 Hot New Releases for HR

Death by HR hits #1 Hot New Releases for HR

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations

[Death by HR: How Affirmative Action Cripples Organizations]

The first review is in: by Elmer T. Jones, author of The Employment Game. 

Corporate HR Scrambles to Halt Publication of “Death by HR”

Nobody gets a job through HR. The purpose of HR is to protect their parent organization against lawsuits for running afoul of the government’s diversity extortion bureaus. HR kills companies by blanketing industry with onerous gender and race labor compliance rules and forcing companies to hire useless HR staff to process the associated paperwork… a tour de force… carefully explains to CEOs how HR poisons their companies and what steps they may take to marginalize this threat. For it is now fairly impossible for any company not to erect an HR wall as a legal requirement of business with the sole purpose of keeping government diversity compliance enforcers as well as unethical lawyers from pillaging their operating capital through baseless lawsuits… It is time to turn the tide against this madness and Death by HR is an important research tool…  to craft counter-revolutionary tactics for dealing with the HR parasites our government has empowered to destroy us. All CEOs should read this book. If you are a mere worker drone but care about your company, you should forward an anonymous copy to him.