Many New Job-Killing Regulations from the Obama Administration

Great post by Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

"Andrew Stiles describes “Ten Job-Destroying Regulations” from the Obama administration that will wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs. Another job-killing regulation is the Obama administration’s recent demand that trucking companies employ alcoholics as truckers rather than assigning them to less safety-sensitive positions — a demand that will lead to costly lawsuits against trucking companies by accident victims, and thus discourage anyone from setting up new trucking companies.

Still another is the Obama EEOC’s current practice of suing some employers who consider applicants’ arrest records and criminal convictions in hiring — a practice it is now considering broadening, through agency guidance further restricting consideration of applicants’ criminal histories in hiring decisions. If you were thinking of starting a new business, wouldn’t you be less likely to do so if you thought you would have no freedom as to whom you could hire, and no freedom to consider someone’s dangerousness or the content of their character before hiring them? If you don’t hire a criminal, the EEOC may sue you for “disparate impact”; but if you do hire the criminal, you may later be sued under a state law for “negligent hiring” if the criminal harms someone on the job or while doing errands for your company.

The Obama Justice Department used the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to attack new technologies that were helpful to disabled people (under the theory that they weren’t helpful enough, even though they were more helpful than pre-existing technologies), and is trying to use the ADA to regulate the Internet. It also has signed an international disabled-rights treaty that could undermine U.S. sovereignty.

Deferring to the Obama administration’s interpretation of the ADA, the most-liberal federal appeals court recently ruled against Chipotle in a lawsuit that will lead to hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and attorney fees and a no-win, catch-22 situation for the company. To satisfy the Justice Department’s interpretation of the ADA, Chipotle which must lower its employee counter tops to make them easier for disabled patrons to view. But to comply with worker-safety rules, it must keep counter tops high. (Ironically, the appeals court’s ruling in Antoninetti v. Chipotle conflicted with one of its own past rulings, violating the rule that one panel of an appeals court cannot contradict an earlier panel.)

We wrote earlier about how unemployment has risen due to Obama administration policies, and how perverse economic disincentives contained in the health care law will shrink the economy by at least 400,000 jobs, and more likely around 800,000 jobs.

Tagged as: ADA, alcoholics, alcoholism, Americans With Disabilities Act, Chipotle, civil rights division, criminal convictions, disparate impact, EEOC, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, felons, Justice Department, Obama Justice Department."