Government race- and gender-based quotas will weaken the high-tech industry

Not long ago, in a blog post entitled The coming impact of disparate impact, I wrote:

Wikipedia states:
In United States employment law, the doctrine of disparate impact holds that employment practices may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have a disproportionate "adverse impact" on members of a minority group. Under the doctrine, a violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act may be proven by showing that an employment practice or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on members of the protected class as compared with non-members of the protected class.

One of the great advocates of the doctrine of disparate impact is Thomas Perez, who currently serves as the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice and earlier this year was nominated by President Obama to be Secretary of Labor. Of him, WSJ writes:

Mr. Perez is a champion of disparate-impact theory, which purports to prove racial discrimination by examining statistics rather than intent or specific cases.

Expect disparate impact doctrine to be used by the Justice and Labor Departments and by trial lawyers to … strong arm [Silicon Valley companies] into hiring more blacks, Hispanics, and women. The fact that the distribution of these groups in the high-tech industry is not the same as their distribution in the general population will be used as evidence that these companies engage in discriminatory employment practices.

In a second recent blog post, entitled Jesse has landed, I quoted from a story in the San Jose Mercury News, which described Jesse Jackson's recent attempts to shake down the high-tech industry for more jobs:

Jackson led a delegation to Hewlett-Packard's annual shareholders meeting Wednesday to bring attention to Silicon Valley's poor record of including blacks and Latinos in hiring, board appointments and startup funding. ...

Earl "Butch" Graves Jr., president and CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, said Jackson is shining a light on the fact that technology companies don't come close to hiring or spending what is commensurate with the demographics of their customers.

In still another post, entitled In politics, everything is, well, politicized, I observed that the hopelessly politicized hiring processes used by the government would prevent it from ever achieving the kind of performance one finds in the private sector when it comes to implementing high-tech projects:

[A]sk yourself: What will happen if the federal government changes its hiring practices and it turns out that 70% of new high-tech hires are male and 40% are Asian and Indian? Once again, won't Jesse Jackson and the rest of the affirmative action Stasi spring into action and pressure the government into creating quotas for women, blacks, and Hispanics for those plum, high-paying high-tech jobs? … The problem is that government hiring is often based not on merit, but on politics. And in politics everything is, well, politicized. But, if hiring practices in the federal government continue to be based on politics rather than merit, there is no way that the high-tech workforce in government will ever be as good as it is in the private sector.

Well, now the AP reports:

[On Tuesday, t]he president … will direct the Labor Department to adopt rules requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data based on sex and race. … Federal contractors … worry that additional compensation data could be used to fuel wage related lawsuits, said James Plunkett, director of labor policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

So, any Silicon Valley company that has a federal contract (gee, how many can that be?) will be forced to submit "compensation data." If these data reveal that not enough members of the preferred victim groups are employed or that their pay deviates statistically from the norm, then, these companies will be made to feel the wrath of the Obama Administration. Namely, they will be forced to create quotas for the hiring of more women, blacks, Hispanics and other victim groups, regardless of their qualifications.

In one final blog post, entitled To Cnn, "Asian diversity" is not real diversity, I sounded the following warning:

One thing is for certain. If high tech companies are ever strongarmed into instituting "diversity programs" to increase the number of Hispanics, blacks, and women in the ranks of the Silicon Valley workforce, it will be the death knell of the area's vibrant economy (the only thing that might be more damaging would be the unionization of the high-tech workforce). Instead of being allocated strictly on merit, jobs will be allocated based on the color of one's skin or gender (or seniority in unions). As I noted above, these are non-essential characteristics that have nothing to do with engineering talent. Any industry that bases its selection of workers on such non-essential characteristics is doomed to failure.

Wake up, Silicon Valley! The politicized hiring practices of the Obama Administration are making their way into high-tech and threaten to destroy the vibrant, meritocratic economy you have worked so hard to create.