1792 Insights
The 1792 Exchange is committed to delivering sharp, data-driven analysis of corporate America’s political entanglements. Discover what investors, executives, and concerned citizens should know regarding why businesses should return to neutral, mission-focused operations.
The EEOC’s mission is opportunity for all, not demographic bean-counting
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 …