In the Superman comics, Bizarro World is a place where everything is exactly backward. It is a cube-shaped planet where ugliness is admired, failure is celebrated, lies are preferred to truth, and the normal rules of logic are turned upside down. What is obviously true on Earth becomes false, and what is plainly false is treated as a self-evident fact.
Donna Brazile recently accused the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of abandoning its purpose by proposing to end mandatory annual race-and-sex workforce reporting. Her argument reads like a dispatch from Bizarro World.
In truth, the commission’s July 21 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to rescind the EEO-1 and related demographic reports is a long-overdue course correction that reorients the agency to the actual text and original intent of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VII forbids discrimination against any individual based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It does not authorize the government to compel every covered employer, regardless of whether a single discrimination charge has been filed, to annually sort its workforce into racial and sex categories and submit the tallies to Washington. That regime, in place for decades, imposed nearly $275 million in annual compliance costs on employers and roughly $4 million on the agency itself, according to the commission’s own estimates.
Essentially, every American business has been treated as a potential suspect and every employee as an overly simplified data point in a group-identity spreadsheet.
The commission’s proposed rescission would put an end to this nanny-state surveillance. Employees will continue to be covered by all current legal workplace protections. Employers will still be subject to all employment laws and will remain subject to investigation and litigation when credible charges of discrimination arise. And the commission will retain full authority to request tailored records relevant to specific cases.
What disappears would be the costly, routine collection of demographic data disconnected from any allegation of wrongdoing. That change would free businesses from focusing on perfecting quotas for bureaucratic federal forms so that they could return focus on their core mission: producing goods and services, innovating, and competing. What doesn’t change is the expectation to treat all employees legally and fairly. It is good for commerce and good for employees.
Equal opportunity means hiring, promoting, compensating and retaining people based on merit, skill, experience, and performance. No serious person opposes diverse teams that arise naturally from a wide talent pool. What must end is the pressure — legal, regulatory or cultural — to engineer outcomes by race or sex.
Treating individuals as interchangeable members of preferred or disfavored groups is the opposite of the color-blind principle that civil-rights law was meant to enshrine. The Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that racial classifications by the government are deeply suspect. Compelling private employers to maintain and report those same classifications year after year sits in direct opposition to that principle.
Critics claim ending these reporting requirements will somehow “cover up” discrimination. This confuses measurement with remedy. Discrimination does not magically disappear because a spreadsheet is filed. Nor does a spreadsheet alone give a full picture as to whether or not discrimination is happening.
When workforce discrimination does occur, it is discovered and remedied through individual complaints, investigations, and when necessary, the courts. Aggregate statistics have never been a reliable proxy for individualized wrongdoing, and as we seen, they have often been misused as a tool to pressure employers into preferential treatment rather than equal treatment.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent outreach clarifying that white men (along with any other classification of employees) can and should report discrimination when it is experienced is not a betrayal of the agency’s mission. Rather, it is a clear return to it. Our nation’s laws protect every person and every employee, not only those in a specific or currently favored category. Discrimination against anyone in the workplace is wrong and should be eradicated.
America’s workplaces function best when managers are allowed to evaluate talent, not check boxes. Employees succeed when they are judged not by their demographic identity, but by what they can contribute to the organization. The commission’s proposed rule aligns the agency with that reality. It would reduce unnecessary regulatory burden, reaffirm equal opportunity for all, and let business get back to work creating value.
This is not abandonment of the commission’s core mission. It is the long-overdue recovery of it and a long-awaited return from Bizarro World.
Originally published in The Hill