At a dinner party recently, a person who identifies as a “man” and who is married to another person who identifies as a “man”, disclosed his hatred of Donald Trump (not a big risk in Massachusetts!). On the list of the Trumpenfuhrer’s crimes was “I can be fired if I tell my boss that I am gay.” I tried to refrain from pointing out that as an unemployed person in his mid-50s, he probably wouldn’t be hired in the first place simply due to his age (i.e., that he’d have to get hired despite his age before becoming eligible to be fired due to his sexual preference).
This thought made me wonder, actually, why Americans in the LGBTQIA+ community would want a law protecting them from workplace discrimination. The protected classes are people whom employers consider to be inferior workers:
- the old: less energy, freighted down with family responsibilities, likely to run up expensive medical bills on the “self-insured” employer health plan
- the disabled: by definition, lacking some kind of ability that most other workers have
- women: potentially less motivated to work due to being in a higher tax bracket than men due to eligibility for means-tested welfare benefits, alimony, or child support (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/01/book-review-the-redistribution-recession/ and Claudia Goldin on the gender gap in working hours)
- non-white/non-Asian: constantly featured in the New York Times as doing poorly in school
Is there any evidence that employers currently believe that LGBTQIA+ workers are less healthy, less energetic, less intelligent, less motivated, less able, and/or less educated than non-LGBTQIA+ workers? If not, why spread this negative perception by adding LGBTQIA+ identification to the list of people who need the government to force employers to retain them as workers?
>why spread this negative perception by adding LGBTQIA+ identification to the list of people who need the government to force employers to retain them as workers?
Because Amanda Strathmore Latimore (Mount Holyoke ’86) needs some intersection
to park her oppression.
In my days working in PR in New York, there was a general consensus that gay men were the best employees – smart, hard working, and unencumbered by family obligations. Don’t know if that is still the case.
Wonder why he blames Donald Trump for this factoid (assuming it is true, which it probably isn’t) since legislation in the US originates in the House, which is controlled by the Dems. Phil’s point about discrimination based on factors irrelevant to the business as being irrational and leading to destruction of business value is one made a long time ago by Gary Becker.
Was just going to say the same thing about age discrimination. Laws against it spread a negative perception about old programmers & require interviewers to make up silly excuses like we don’t fit into the culture.
House Resolution 5, passed by the HR this year, but not yet passed by (this) senate, makes it a crime. Therefore employment discrimination lawsuits will be brought under federal law once it passes. As we have seen, LGBTQIA is all about lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits. It’s really as simple as that. Read Section 2, Findings. Congress has *found* that those things are true.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/5/text
Now that the House of Representatives has *found* those things, you don’t really expect the LGBTQIA+ lobby to go back and tell them: “No, take that out! It’s not true! We’re not discriminated against! You’re spreading negative perceptions of us!”
I think where you write hired “he probably wouldn’t be hired in the first place simply due to his age”, you actually meant “fired”
Scott: Our mid-50s Trump-hater is currently unemployed. So he needs to get hired despite being old before he can be fired for being gay!
(Tweaked the original post to clarify.)
Because they’re stupid and incapable of considering more than immediate effect of these laws. Anyone capable of rational thinking would understand that special protections for a class of workers make employers less likely to hire somebody from the protected class in the first place (or if they hire they adjust offered compensation downwards to account for the higher risk). All these laws do is creating liabilities for employers. It is very easy to find quite legal excuses for not hiring. It’s much hader and costlier to fight a discrimination lawsuit which is likely to result from less than perfectly handled firing of a non-performing diversity queen.
So your opinion is employers should be able to hire/fire based on religion or race?
Sure, allowing open discrimination has never caused any problems in the U.S.A… please stick to using the White Only water fountain and blacks at the back of the bus.
OpenlyRacist: What are your examples of successful companies that hired and fired people based on religion or race?
At least as far back as 1913 it seems that this was not a reliable path to profits. See https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-negro-and-the-labor-unions/529524/ by Booker T. Washington in which he notes that employers wanted to hire African Americans while labor unions sought to prevent this: “In several instances Negroes are expressly excluded from membership in the unions. In other cases individual Negroes have been refused admittance to unions where no such restrictions existed, and have been in consequence shut out from employment at their trades. … Another reason why Negroes are prejudiced against the unions is that, during the past few years, several attempts have been made by the members of labor unions which do not admit Negroes to membership, to secure the discharge of Negroes employed in their trades.”
(Since the advent of Affirmative Action, I guess you could say that quite a few American employers actually do hire based on race (but probably not fire), but on the third hand the most aggressive race-based hiring systems are operated by government and non-profit organizations that don’t face conventional competition.)
@averros: Actually I think it’s just the opposite: the effect of the law in terms of new lawsuits isn’t just predictable, it’s the main reason for including the new language about gender identity. They want the lawsuits, they want the path to sue everyone for anything including their use of pronouns in the workplace.
Nike just got slapped with a $1.1 million discrimination lawsuit because one Jazz Lyles, who identifies as “transmasculine” prefers pronouns different than the ones his co-workers “misgendered” him with:
“During Lyles’ tenure at Nike — from May 2017 to September 2018 — the engineer was repeatedly “misgendered” by coworkers, the complaint said. While Lyles notified management about the issue multiple times, the companies allegedly failed to implement any policies, procedures and trainings around the use of gender pronouns in the workplace.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nike-transgender-former-contractor-sues-nike-for-1-1-million-for-alleged-misgendering/
> What are your examples of successful companies that hired and fired people based on religion or race?
B & H and every Chinese restaurant?
@Cake Baker – I would say most LGBTQ-whatever people are decent and don’t want any special privileges. These laws make life more difficult for them. The small but very vocal and politically aggressive cadre of socialist cultists and power-hungry psychopaths organizing them are ruining normal life for the people they claim to protect. Those few of LGBTQ who dare to challenge the fanatics are immediately shouted down and attacked as apostates – Milo is just the most prominent example. I saw the same on a much smaller scale several times already (I’m in high-tech in SF Bay Area). Sadly, most people never look beyond the kumbaya retoric and see the neo-Stalinists currently running the American Left for what they actually are.
@OpenlyRacist – you picked a fitting nickname for yourself. Because only a diehard racist would bristle at the idea that no race needs special treatment or protection not provided to other race.
The freedom of association for whatever reason (be it political gathering or doing business) requires freedom not to be forced to associate – for whatever reason – with people you don’t want to associate with. Forced association is just another name for collectivism, which is the most murderous cult in the entire history of mankind.
So lets say a wide-spread hatred of left-handed people becomes the norm. Left-handed people can no longer purchase food, cars or take public transportation – because you can’t force people to associate with “devil handers”.
Do those people have the right to buy food and travel freely?
Phil are you serious. My ex-gf is trans and lost her job immediately on transition (i.e., never got another shift after the first time she came in as a woman, even though she gave them advance warning).
There are plenty of people who see being LGBT as a deviation from healthy normality or as a perversion, like happened with One Million Moms trying to get a lesbian kiss pulled from Hallmark TV recently. I don’t understand whether you don’t think this could lead them to firing an employee for coming out, or if you think they should have the right to do so for religious freedom reasons etc.