Anti-discrimination laws
Published by MadMan September 21st, 2004 in LibertarianOK, here’s a good one for you wannabe Cartel members. Let’s hear your stand on this issue.
I’m sure most of you know that USA has numerous laws in place that make it illegal to discriminate against employees on the basis of race or color, religion, sex, pregnancy, childbirth and national origin.
So quite simply, if you don’t like Blacks or Chinese or Indians or Hindus, it doesn’t matter. You cannot discriminate on those grounds. This doesn’t just apply to government jobs. It applies to all employers in the country (unless you have only a handful of workers.)
Tell me, young wannabes, what is your opinion on laws like that?
(This post ends here. The comments section is all yours. The Cartel members will not post there for the time being to avoid unduly influencing your views.)
44 Responses to “Anti-discrimination laws”
- 1 Trackback on Sep 22nd, 2004 at 10:21 pm
- 2 Trackback on Sep 22nd, 2004 at 11:16 pm
If clubs and spas can exist which restrict membership and entry, why not jobs, is my first thought.
If it is ok for a pub or a coffee shop that says “Right of admission reserved”, why not a corporate.
there’s more.
will come back with a detailed post
If one can’t discriminate on the basis of caste, sex, race, stuff, then one should go the whole hog and say one shouldn’t discriminate at all, on whatever basis. A corporate shouldnt discriminate on the basis of intelligence, cunning, experience, qualification, expertise, and other such stuff.
That’s thought number two.
Thought number three, i am not saying it is ok to discriminate. I am saying, if it raises your hacles so much, go set up your own frigging company/club and say only hindus/blacks allowed. Restrict entry to people who you don’t want to.
Just don’t hide behind mom’s saree, sorry, a government law and say give me a job.
thought number four, i do need to work on my spellings.
Hackles, and not hacles. A typo.
BTW, you don’t have to be a wannabe cartel member to post here.
It’s a corporate’s choice. Spare the fashion and the airline industry ;).
A job has requirements. What if the requirements say that the person is say not black, or looks fair? Wouldn’t that count as discrimination?
I personally dont think that such laws are going to make much of a difference because the indian society, IMHO, gives a damn about the laws until n unless they bite them in the butt. I mean, have the Sexual Harrasment laws helped? Well, frankly speaking I dont even kno properly about the laws relating to that but I am quite sure I have heard more cases of it being used against Indians in other countries than in India. Moreover, I do believe that there should be discrimination on the basis of pregnancy and childbirth. These are decisions of an individual and if she is willing to take tht decsion which inturn leads to lowering the output in performance then she should be ready to face the music. People should be held responsible for the choices they make.
(typos regretted)
My stand on the issue: cunning, expertise, experience and all the other things Ravages mentioned have a direct bearing on job performance so it’s natural to discriminate on that basis. On the other hand, it’s difficult to see how race or caste could directly affect your job performance.
I’d draw a distinction between discrimination on the grounds of affiliation, and discrimination on the grounds of practice.
For example, suppose MadMan refuses to employ me at his restaraunt because I’m a Punju. I can’t help being a Punju, I was born that way. So his discrimination is unjustified. However, if he refuses to employ me because as a Punju, I have a Northie accent which puts off the customers, that would be justified, since I could take voice lessons or practice speaking with a Southie accent.
The trouble with this is that there is no way a court of law knows whether he’s not employing me because I’m Punju or because of my accent, because it comes down to my claim against MadMan’s. Noble intentions, but impossible to implement.
Woohoo! Aadisht. Great! Except, I would say, this is not about that. The question is, should the government impose those laws or not. The question is not about discrimination.
My point is, if the government wants to enforce anti-discrimination laws, it needs to go the whole hog and say no discrimination, of any kind.
Or let leave be. Don’t touch me.
I would think the government has no say in how a private enterprise is run. They are doing their bit, paying up taxes, and helping the economy in their way. Let’s leave them alone and not ask them to employ these kind of people and not employ that kind of people.
Aadisht.. If MadMan owns a restaurant, then it is his inviolable right to employ anyone based on “any” criteria, whether discriminatory or non discriminatory.
You may feel that it is unfair, but you have absolutely no right on that job. It belongs to him, to do with it as he pleases!
Jobs are not common resources, for everyone to decide on the correct way to allocate them!
If the question is purely of having/not having anti-discrimination laws, I would say that government needs to have these laws in place.
If an employer denies opportunity to a certain group of people based on their race, religion or colour citing his freedom to do so, why should the government not deny him that freedom citing his failure to comply with certain rules?!
In any case, discrimination based on cunning, experience, intelligence can be proved to have an impact on the economic performance of the company. How can the discrimination based on race, colour or religion be justified?
Digressing a bit… Handa wonders if indian laws on sexual harassment have helped at all. Well… they haven’t! Just because there aren’t any!!
Sunil: yes. When I had initially posted, I was under the impression that I had a fundamental right to dignity, and that MadMan was not violating that. Actually, I don’t have that right under either the Indian constitution or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
Which means that MadMan’s discrimination is morally but not legally unjustifiable. So you’re right, the government shouldn’t do anything about it.
Such compulsions in govt jobs are well and good .. you supply the jobs .. make up your own rules. Similarly if the jobs are in the private sector me feels it should be left up to the entity concerned whom to hire, and whom not. If the enity is concerned about its progress, it will end up choosing the best people qualified for the job, (albeit it may be influenced a bit by it’s leanings to wards say a particular community). So, if a company has the practise of hiring only say Indian people, other communities may view it as discrimination and choose not to use said company’s products, thereby giving a reaction to the company’s policy. So, ultimately the scales will balance out influencing the company’s decision-making (whether to restrict hiring to a particular community or whatever) and also the consumer rection.
Can this be compared (at some level) with the scholarships offered by individuals in India. I was surprised to see many scholarships are restricted to students of some particular community. i.e. only they are eligible for it. As the individual is offering the support, it is her choice of candidate that will get it.
typos regretted :-P
Has the quiet period for the Cartelians ended? This member of the high council would like to blog about Palanpur jains and Hero cycles.
Ravi, I think that we should let at least 24 hours lapse before posting, don’t you? :)
And folks, Yazad can’t say it, but I can! Click on those Google ads!
Having a law is counter productive *always* and this is a classic example.
The idea of this law *if* it serves well would negate the idea of “survival of the fittest” as it would in a sense force fitness.If the basic idea behind the law is stupid - then that is what it becomes.
Personally though, I would prefer laws - because they are always funny!
There are a couple of things here I do not agree with and a couple that make a lot of sense.
When Aadisht says that, “it’s difficult to see how race or caste could directly affect your job performance.” I can’t agree with him more. There is nothing in a particular race/ethinicity that makes people from that group more or less capable than others.
Secondly, when an enterprise selects people based on their performance and abilities, I fail to see how that can be considered discrimination. There is a certain job to do, person A does it better than person B, and so he gets the job. Plain and simple.
Finally, I completely disagree with Handa when he says that a woman should be responsible for the decisions she makes. She is! That is why she goes through 9 freakin months of labor! The least a company can do is protect her job and make sure that she does not face a disadvantage because of this temporary period.
Prashant,
We’re talking specifically about laws that say you cannot discriminate against a person on grounds such as race, religion, caste, etc.
Do you support or oppose these laws?
Madhu,
It should be clear from Prashant’s reply that he supports anti-discriminatory laws.
Interesting question is as follows:
A is an employer with certain religious beliefs and B is an employee with certain other beliefs. The belief of A specifies that you can’t do a certain thing (eg. don’t eat beef). While person B’s belief says that at certain time, he is required to do the very same thing (eg. required to eat beef on 21 Sept). How do you resolve this situation.
[A simple way would be for B to go out of office and have beef… but people don’t always behave rationally, no matter what the cartel tells you :)]
BTW, I support the law that prohibits discrimination based on race, sex, color, religion or sexual orientation.
The law against discrimination in the private sector does not make any sense. For government jobs, the law is fine, as long as it is defined un-ambiguously.
If I start a company, I should have the freedom to decide which people to employ in that company. Say, I make a decision that I will employ only disabled asian people, I dont want the government to say that I am discriminating against healthy and/or non-asian people. Government should not interfere with my choices, even when I am running a company. The people can choose to buy or not to buy the products/services our company offers.
On the other hand for government jobs, as long as the applicants can perform the job effectively, no other criteria should be used to discriminate the applicants. The main criteria should be the ability to perform the job best. Period.
my 2p.
I don’t think that the law makes much difference in this case but it is still needed. Let me explain why-
Say you are black, have the appropriate qualifications and apply for a job and say your employer is racist, he is completely free to turn you down on any number of other criteria (say lack of relevent expereince, etc.). The real reason may be that he just does not like blacks but how difficult is it to cook up any number of non-racial reasons to deny you employment.
Despite this, the reason why the law is needed is that it allows people to challenge a decision if after closer examination it is revealed that race was the only discriinating factor.
A study was conducted (I’m sorry I can’t site the source but it was well publicized in the US) where some University profs replied to job ad’s with identical cooked up resumes. The resumes were identical but in some resumes they used obviously black names like Tyrone and Taneesha while in others they used very white names like Brad and Eric. They found that the white names got far more responses than the black names which were mostly turned down.
In India I remember reading how Muslims are not allowed to live in certain housing colonies and the reason given is that it has nothing to do with their religion, it is just that they do not welcome non-vegetarians in the colony.
So it is easy to manufacture reasons and the law is easy to circumvent but I am still in favor of keeping it around mainly as it does no harm and serves as a useful reminder that discrimination is not to be tolerated.
Stressing a point here again, I think, but still… I don’t want laws. No law ought to tell me whom to hire, and whom not to. If the government is so concerned about discrimination, let it go ahead and set up a organization (goes against my capitalistic grain, but still) in the same field and hire the people it wants, and not discriminate.
I am not saying that discrimination is good. I am saying let’s not have government bureaucracy interfering and muddling it up. If a candidate feels that he has been unjustly treated, let him campaign for the community to boycott the company and its products. Let the so called market forces decide. Why would you want some body of people sitting in some obscure building decide on what doesn’t affect them in the least
Madhu,
As Niket correctly pointed out, I do support anti-discriminatory laws.
My support stems from the fact that all humans irrespective of their race, color and sex do not have drastically differing capacities of learning.
A number of people commenting here are mixing the issue of anti-discrimination and reservation.
A law should not allow an employer to make a negative hiring decision based on race, cast and sex etc. While doing so it should also not require an employer to make a positive hiring decision based on those parameters.
In essence, the law should not be telling you who to hire. It should be telling you that you cannot not hire based on the above discussed criteria.
Ravi, you wanted to say something?
OK two questions to everyone:
1) Is it really true that hiring people based on caste will never make business sense? Note that I am quite emphatically not asking if people of one caste are better at certain jobs than others. I am asking, is it ever possible that discrimination based on caste makes business sense?
2) Discrimination can be really really subtle. I’ve heard of a temple in Udupi where there used to be different seating areas for food for Brahmins and for others. Once it was banned, they started the practice of asking people for their gothras before assigning them seating.
Turns out that they weren’t actually segregating people by gothra. But Brahmins of that area have their gothra at the tip of their tongue while others have to think for a few seconds before answering. They were using this as the way to find out who was a Brahmin and who wasn’t.
My question to those who support anti-discrimination laws and actually expect it to work (as against CK who wants the laws to make a fashion statement)
How do you propose to write laws against such things?
Ravi, “laws do not work” is a very general argument against having anti-discrimination laws.
In the absence of anti-discrimination laws, we have seen how an entire class of people was denied equal treatment in the US. Maybe things may not be as bad if the anti-discrimination laws were absent now. But how do you propose to provide a safety net if things do return to a state of widespread discrimination? Market forces or mutual consent will not work here because this is an issue of basic compassion or the lack of it.
1) It occasionaly does make business sense.
2) Anti-discrimination laws should be in place for government jobs. Person with best ability to perform the said job, gets the job.
Sameer, it is you who generalised to say that “laws do not work”. I did not say that. In fact I have not yet said that “anti-discrimination laws do not work”, though I will eventually. I am saying that it is the responsibility of those who propose a law to explain to me how they will work.
Without a law, how would you ensure that the fundamental right to freedom from discrimination, based on race, religion, caste, sex, etc., prescribed by the Constitution is made available to the citizens?
Market forces do not distinguish between the market and the people. Free market theory uses hard logic as against pragmatism and compassion. Mutual consent goes flying out of the window when freedom takes precedence over equality.
In any case, I quote Adam Smith…
“But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; …”
Without a law, how would you ensure that the fundamental right to freedom from discrimination, based on race, religion, caste, sex, etc., prescribed by the Constitution is made available to the citizens?
Anything you say can and will be used against you. ;)
I’m giving you fair warning.
In that case, let me rephrase my statement… ;-)
Without a law, how would you ensure that the fundamental right to freedom from discrimination, based on race, religion, caste, sex, etc., prescribed by the Constitution is not made unavailable to a certain section of the citizens?
Sameer,
It is oxymoronic if you want your fundamental right to be “given” to you by a rule book(or anything else for that matter).
Nilu… please refer to my re-phrased statement. I believe it no longer remains oxymoronic.
I believe it no longer remains oxymoronic.
It remains wrong, however. :)
Hint: The mistake is in your interpretation.
Discrimination Laws
Yazad: naked URL converted to a link.
In the discussion of efficiency, one element is rarely mentioned: the employer’s personal preference. If I am so uncomfortable in the presence of <members of some protected group> that I’m willing to reduce my profits by excluding them, is that preference less legitimate than the very common and unquestioned preference for endogamy?
Prashant says: A number of people commenting here are mixing the issue of anti-discrimination and reservation.
The trouble is the ease with which anti-discrimination in principle becomes reservation in practice. If the protected group is not proportionally represented among your employees (or students…), the regulators often take it as presumptive evidence of prohibited discrimination.
Oops, 7*6 discusses that very point.
I had written in the spontaneous order mailing list about how minimum wage laws reduce the cost of discrimination (offering differing wages to people who offer the same marginal output)
Of course, coming to discrimination itself, the question is thorny. At the risk of sounding pontiff-like, let me make a motherhood statement.
The whole issue of discrimination laws is one of trust in the free market. If the people trust the free-market to continue producing good jobs, vocations, investment opportunities, etc. then there is no need of anti-discrimination laws as anyone who discriminates is just going to end up as the loser.
The employer loses potential employees, the investor loses potential opportunities.
But if the game is seen as zero-sum in which the number of jobs and opportunities are limited, then the discriminators gain because they become rent-seekers for the precious few jobs that they hold. Therefore anti-discrimination laws arise that seek to redress these “ills”.
This is another classic example of how intervention in the market causes even more interventions.
Economic control leads to reduced opportunities - leads to discrimination notbeing economically punished - leads to discrimination -leads to call for more anti-discrimination laws.
i just stumbled on this today.
I don’t believe we should have anti - discrimination laws. (in fact, laws of most kinds are mostly unnecessary)
Ideally, the market shold be able to accomodate the “discrimantors” with a penalty of diminished returns and the discriminatees should still be able to get jobs on par with those they would get in an undiscriminatory world.
but then we’d need a lot more information on who’s discriminating etc. for eg: true blue feminists still go to the store and buy videocon products b/c they are the cheapest. but videocon will not employ women in a managerial postion.
how do you address that.
our constitution guarantees us a life without discrimination. how do we ensure that that is indeed the case?
i also think that if we didn’t have anti-discrimination laws that things would not be fair for minorities.