Convenience Store Chain Prosecuted for Obeying the Law

While we are on the subject of our unjust “justice system,” here’s a story you couldn’t make up.

Sheetz is a familiar 70-year-old convenience store/gas station chain based in Pennsylvania with 10,000 employees. This week, the Biden Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued it for discriminatory hiring practices.

Let’s peel back this onion. The EEOC lawsuit accuses Sheetz of disproportionately rejecting black, Native American, and multiracial job candidates in the criminal background checks it conducted.

But firms are required to conduct background checks and Sheetz is being sued for using the very same background checks for its employees that the EEOC uses to hire THEIR workers. The EEOC is guilty of what they are accusing Sheetz of.

The Office of Personnel Management, which handles hiring for federal executive branch positions including at the EEOC, says on its website:

Background evaluations…seek information about an applicant’s employment, criminal, and personal history in an effort to investigate behavioral reliability, integrity, and personal adjustment.

Background evaluations are conducted to determine whether there are any historical facts that would interfere with an applicant’s ability to perform the job, including violations of statutes, regulations, or laws.

But now the EEOC is saying that background checks are discriminatory because they disproportionately disqualify certain minority groups – such as blacks – with higher rates of criminal records.

This is a classic government Catch-22. The government often requires criminal background checks, but now wants to penalize companies for using background checks. They get you coming and going.

Gail Heriot, a law professor who is a conservative appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights notes: “The EEPC will go after an employer even when the employer is simply following a state law that requires it to exclude job applicants with a felony record for a particular job. So far, Congress has been too timid to intervene.”

It’s just another example of what we reported earlier this week: Biden has declared war on small and medium sized businesses.

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