Overgovernment: Discrimination Edition
Written by Brian Garst, Posted in Big Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society
Most people would think that it’s common sense that abusing alcohol can cost you your job, especially when that job involves driving 18 wheelers. But the federal government ain’t most people:
The federal government has sued a major trucking company for its firing of driver with an admitted alcohol abuse problem.
Alcoholism is classified as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the suit maintains, and therefore employees cannot be prohibited even from driving 18 wheelers due to their histories of abuse.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which filed the suit against the Old Dominion Freight Line trucking company on August 16, noted that while “an employer’s concern regarding safety on our highways is a legitimate issue, an employer can both ensure safety and comply with the ADA.”
Dios mio!
The Americans with Disabilities Act is one of the worst cases of overgovernment this country has been hit with. Passed with noble intentions, the act has saddled the economy with massive compliance costs, unleashed a torrent of frivolous lawsuits, and stretched the common sense understanding of “disability” beyond all recognition.
But of all these unintended consequence, the most perverse is how the ADA has made the disabled less employable.
The use of the ADA to protect alcoholics goes beyond what I think most people thought such legislation was passed to accomplish. “Discrimination” has in many ways gotten a bad rap. Not all discrimination is bad. In fact, most is not. Everyone discriminates all the time. Rational thought requires discriminating against differing ideas. Choosing friends means discriminating against the untrustworthy, the boring or the unpleasant. Likewise, running a business requires discriminating against bad practices in favor of good ones, or discriminating against incompetent employees in favor of the productive, and discriminating against people that cannot be counted on, like frickin’ alcoholics. Of course, some businesses might put up with such things if the employee is capable of doing their job in spite of their personal failings, and that is their right. There’s simply no reason why a trucking company should be forced to do so.
Sure, there are things on which people ought not discriminate, but the word applies to more than just such instances. Our linguistic inability to recognize such distinctions anymore is now affecting how we apply laws like the ADA.
Though the misuse of discrimination is not just limited to the ADA. Consider this recent pronouncement from the President:
Obama noted that the long-term unemployed have a tougher time landing jobs and said a stronger overall economy would make employers less choosy. “But we have seen instances in which employers are explicitly saying we don’t want to take a look at folks who’ve been unemployed,” the president said.
“Well, that makes absolutely no sense, and I know there’s legislation that I’m supportive of that says you cannot discriminate against folks because they’ve been unemployed, particularly when you’ve seen so many folks who, through no fault of their own, ended up being laid off because of the difficulty of this recession.”
In the unloaded sense of the word, of course it’s discrimination. All hiring is discrimination. Employers discriminate on any number of qualities in order to sort out the one candidate they want to hire over the ones they don’t. But the President is using “discrimination” in its loaded, there-ought-to-be-a-law sense, or he wouldn’t have bothered to make the observation. And he even explicitly said that he supports the government attempting to legislate the issue.
Whether or not it’s the wisest hiring practice is debatable, and may be more or less true in different hiring environments, or for different sectors of the economy, or even different individual businesses. Which is exactly the point: the President, or the government in general, is in the worst possible position for deciding the question. The businesses are in the best position, and it should be left to them.
Ultimately, this is just the President blowing smoke over why the jobless rate remains so high. He is attempting to deflect from his own blatant failures, and this weak sauce excuse is apparently the best he can come up with – well, that and those pesky ATMs.
I serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.