There are two ways to enforce rights. A government agency can do it, or it can be outsourced to private contractors, which means plaintiffs' lawyers. If we're going to use a government agency, then we have to make sure they do it efficiently, because our tax dollars fund those agencies. If we're going to use private lawyers, they've got to be able to make good money doing it, otherwise they'll do something else instead. If neither of those systems works for us, then let's not pretend that we care about the rights that we're refusing to enforce.
The New York Times presented a front-page article on April 17 about lawyers suing New York City businesses that don't have good wheelchair access. The story is that the plaintiffs' lawyers are finding violations -- easy in New York City, with its many ancient buildings, narrow-aisled, with aging or nonexistent ramps -- and then choosing a plaintiff from a cadre of disabled people. Then the lawyers threaten to sue the allegedly violating business, the plaintiff gets a few hundred dollars, the lawyer gets a few thousand, and it all seems like a shakedown to the poor business owner. Of course, this is not how it's supposed to work. A wronged person is supposed to seek out the lawyer, not the other way around. So this article has provoked anger against the trial lawyers who are supposedly abusing the system for their own enrichment.
Having lived in New York, I treasure the funky old out-of-compliance stores, where even a non-handicapped person has difficulty navigating the aisles. I love those places, and my personal belief is that a variance ought to be available to them so they can preserve their funky old character, even if it means that the "temporarily able-bodied" are the only people who can safely get in and out.
But of course, that's not the law. That's not the choice that we as a country have made about this issue. The choice that we made, and the law that we passed to enforce that choice, is that almost all businesses open to the public have to be able to safely accommodate handicapped people.
And then we as a country made another choice: the government would not be given the resources to enforce this law. Instead, we would give an incentive to private contractors (lawyers) to enforce the law, by forcing out-of-compliance businesses to pay the lawyers' fees when the lawyer could prove that the business was out of compliance.
So now we're angry at lawyers for being too aggressive in their enforcement?
Well, here's a story about what happens when we choose the other path of having a government agency enforce the laws.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is supposed to investigate alleged employment discrimination, then if it finds a violation, negotiate with the violating business to fix it, and if that doesn't work, then the EEOC may file a lawsuit against the business. Note that the EEOC is required to try to negotiate a workable solution before it files a lawsuit. Seems reasonable. But the EEOC is short of resources. They field about 100,000 complaints of discrimination every year. They recovered more than $450 million for employees last year, with a budget of $343 million. So you could say they're running a profit, sort of. But they are still constantly understaffed, overworked, and simply don't have anywhere near the resources needed to investigate every one of those 100,000 claims.
So, like all government agencies, the EEOC has to decide how to most efficiently allocate their scarce resources. One obvious choice is to focus on companies that are practicing system-wide discrimination, so they can bring class-action suits.
For example, CRST Van Expedited Inc. is one of the largest trucking companies in the United States. They have an "internship" program, in which women who want to become truck drivers are paired with male truck drivers, and left together unaccompanied for weeks at a time, with predictable results.
By bringing a claim against a company like this, which has allegedly caused sexual discrimination and harassment against hundreds of women, the EEOC should be able to use its resources efficiently, right? Protect hundreds of women with just one big lawsuit, instead of trying to pick them off one at a time, which would take forever, and lots of agency resources. Well, the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals just slapped down the EEOC, saying that their lawsuit against the trucking company fails because the EEOC did not take the required step of trying to negotiate in good faith with the trucking company about each case individually.
But doing that would eliminate the efficiency of having one big case instead of many small ones. The EEOC did negotiate with CRST about their (idiotic) program as a whole, but not about each individual case. Sure, in an ideal world, they would talk about each case separately. But in a world where efficiency matters, that's a crazy requirement. It's exactly the kind of requirement, in fact, that makes a government agency unable to perform its function of keeping the workplace free of discrimination.
Which leaves it to whom, exactly, to to enforce our rights against workplace discrimination? Why, to the private lawyers, of course. In fact, one of the few women who opted out of the EEOC suit against this trucking company sued CRST privately. The jury awarded her $1.5 million.
We as a country have to decide what rights we want to enforce, and whether to enforce them with government agencies, or with private contractors. But whipsawing back and forth is unfair. If we choose government agencies, then we've got to let them be efficient. Listen up, Eight Circuit. If we choose private contractors, then we've got to let the profit motive motivate them. Listen up, lawyer-bashers.