Illinois legislation would mandate corporate board quotas is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

July 18 roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“California Bill Would Mandate Gender Quotas For Publicly Traded Companies” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Schools and childhood roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Affirmative action hiring for the disabled is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“They have the power to be intrusive and expensive to contractors that they believe are not playing ball on this,” said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “If the initiative means anything, it means that they are signaling to ‘Please be one of the ones that we think is trying to make these benchmarks, because if we think that you’re one of the ones we think are not trying to make the benchmarks, you will be hearing from us.’”

Earlier here, here and here. As I observed back in February:

To achieve the [7 percent disabled goal], employers will need to hope that large numbers of new hires will turn out to have less visible disabilities, such as back problems, diabetes or (perhaps most useful because most subjectively defined) the array of mental, emotional and behavioral issues that are the most dynamically expansive disability category of all, and which can range from neurosis to learning disability to oppositional defiant disorder to drug and alcohol abuse (if in rehab).

Trouble is, it’s illegal under the ADA for employers to ask job applicants whether they’re disabled, even if the question is offered with favorable intent. So the rules contemplate a fan dance of “invited self-identification” in which workers are given repeated chances at successive stages of the hiring process to announce that they are disabled. Unfortunately for quota compliance, even after getting the job an employee may be too shy to offer such a self-identification, which means the employer may lose any “credit” for the hire. Perhaps equally frustrating, an employee hired with the quota in mind may turn out not to have any disability at all (“Dang it! And she looked so disabled!”).

Wednesday hearing on OFCCP disabled, veterans quotas is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

• Under the regulations, Bader points out, contractors will be obliged to aim for a seven percent quota for each division, a significantly harder task than if it were just a company-wide quota.
• Dodgy terminology to conceal the reality of quotas is nothing new; in fact, there’s a long history of federal officials’ resorting to euphemism and vagueness to characterize quotas as benchmarks, goals, and so forth.
• While disabled quotas, unlike racial quotas, do not raise immediate red flags of unconstitutionality, there is serious doubt as to whether they are actually a lawful application of the statutes Congress has passed in this area. While one such law does refer vaguely to affirmative action for the disabled, that does not necessarily provide a broad enough basis to authorize the new scheme.
• Will compliance and paperwork on this and a related veteran-quota measure cost federal contractors $6 billion a year, as the Associated General Contractors of America has it? Or less than one-fifth that sum, as OFCCP insists? And does OFCCP face even the slightest consequences if its estimates turn out to be low-balls and the contractors turn out to be right?

[cross-posted, with adaptations, at Cato at Liberty. Edited final paragraph 9/23 to clarify that two quota programs are involved]

Hans Bader on disabled-hiring quotas is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Just don’t call them quotas: disabled-hiring benchmarks for federal contractors is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

Disabled rights roundup is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

More: David Harsanyi at Human Events (quoting my February piece).

“James Bovard: The Wrong Way to Help the Disabled” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system