WE'RE FROM THE CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS, WE'RE HERE TO HELP:

1991 Civil Rights Act Has Hurt Its Intended Beneficiaries (Stuart Taylor Jr., Sept. 8, 2003, National Journal)

When the first President Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, many conservatives complained that it was a "quota bill," as Bush had said of an earlier draft. Congressional Democrats and liberal groups hoped that the legislation would, among other things, help provide access for racial minorities and women to job markets that had been traditionally dominated by white males.

Now comes a statistical study concluding that the 1991 act had precisely the opposite effect, by making employers in traditionally white-male industries marginally less likely to hire minorities and women. Indeed, the study claims, the legislation was part of the reason that "a trend toward greater racial and gender integration in labor markets stopped around 1991."

The study, "The Unintended Consequences of the '91 Civil Rights Act," (PDF) was published in the Summer 2003 issue of Regulation magazine by Paul Oyer, an economics professor at Stanford, and Scott Schaefer, a management professor at Northwestern. It attributes the (rather modest) negative impact on minority and female job seekers to provisions that greatly increased money-damage awards to job-discrimination plaintiffs.

How could the risk of high damage awards for discriminating against minorities and women make employers more hesitant to hire them? Because employers know that far more lawsuits are brought, and far greater damages are awarded, for claims of discrimination in firing than in hiring. So the risk of being sued for turning down a minority or female applicant is dwarfed by the risk of being sued later for firing the same applicant after giving him or her a try.

"The increases in potential damage awards," write Oyer and Schaefer, "coupled with a decades-long trend toward firing-based, and away from
hiring-based, employment-discrimination litigation, means the main impact of the act was to increase the costs to employers of dismissing protected workers.... Because [an employer] feels firing-based costs only if it decides to hire, the costs act as an implicit tax on such hiring. Firing-based protections may therefore lead employers to hire fewer protected workers, not more."

Thus do liberals view life as tragedy but conservatives as comedy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 10, 2003 11:05 PM